Berlinde de Bruyckere

Galleria Continua, San Gimignano

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2008

SMAK, Ghent; and The Hague, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Berlinde de Bruyckere, October 2014 - May 2015, n.p., no. 139, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Owing to the physical properties of the material used, there are a few stable fissures most notably to the long branches. With the artist's instruction and using wax provided by the artist's studio some of these fissures have been stabilised.
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Executed in Berlinde De Bruyckere’s idiosyncratic medley of wax and epoxy, Marthe is emblematic of both the processes of creation and sombre theatricality that makes de Bruyckere one of the most unique sculptors of her generation. Constructing surreal hybrid beings of macabre, curious beauty, she reinterprets some of the most emotive motifs of Western art history and establishes a captivating dialogue with the Old Masters and the medium of sculpture. With significant representation in museum collections, de Bruyckere’s work has continued to gain international acclaim following her compelling presentation Cripplewood, representing the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The present work in particular has been exhibited in a key survey of the artist’s work at SMAK the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent and the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag from October 2014 to May 2015.

Eternally embalmed and writhing in a state of Ovidian metamorphosis, de Bruyckere’s Marthe’s transmuted human form and contorted branch like limbs are at once deeply disturbing and mesmerisingly compelling. Skilfully embodying themes of creation, evolution and decay, Marthe embodies the duality of the body as both the apogee of nature’s beauty and as a grotesque configuration of organic matter. Its life-size elegy to the human form recalls the classical iconography of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome and depicting the climax in the story of Daphne and Phoebus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Slumped and coiled around its wooden base, the mutation and partial figuration of Marthe claims further aesthetic allegiance to Michelangelo’s unfinished marble sculptures; the Atlas Salve for example, trapped within the untreated stone, represents the ceaseless struggle of human beings to free themselves from their material shackles.

In her quest to investigate the peculiar line between beauty, pain, bliss and suffering, that has guided man’s reverent interactions with devotional art, de Bruyckere’s work pays homage to the masters of the German Renaissance, perhaps most pertinently Lucas Cranach the Elder. De Bruyckere has remarked of Cranach: “His subjects were morbid and cruel but there has been always the ambivalence and ambiguity between how the form fits into the subject: there is the death but no blood; there is a sword that kills, but at the same time, the gentle touch of the victim. In a similar way, I feel a strong connection with the stress on the body and its sophisticated, visual language” (Berlinde de Bruyckere in conversation with Marta Gnyp in: Zoo Magazine, No. 29, 2010, p. 17). This unique dialogue between De Bruyckere’s surreal corporeal articulations and the classical iconography of Western sculpture has been explored in a number of major exhibitions, such as Berlinde De Bruyckere im Dialog mit Cranach und Pasolini at the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg in Halle, Germany, which travelled to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland in 2011. In Marthe the artist’s radical inquiry into the human form finds its most poetic expression in de Bruyckere’s curious treatment of the limbs. Through a stylised sense of elongation and subtle distortion the artist reduces the human body to the primal rudiments of vegetal form.