Belgian artist Berlinda de Bruyckere’s exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale, of which Nobel laureate JM Coetzee is the curator, has finally been revealed during the event’s opening week.
Coetzee and De Bruyckere have worked together before on the publication Allen Vlees. A catalog titled Cripplewood / Kreupelhout: Berlinda de Bruyckere and JM Coetzee has been published to accompany the Venice exhibition.
De Bruyckere’s sculpture comprises a tangle of branches, attached to a tree trunk, all made from wax and painted a fleshy colour so that it resembles the limbs of a giant body. The branches are broken, torn and damaged in places with what looks like muscles, tendons and bones exposed. Bandages have been wound around parts of the tree. “For me it’s one big body lying down who needs help, and then nurses came and put the bandages around it,” De Bruyckere explains in an article by Sarah Douglas for Gallerist NY.
In the article it is related how De Bruyckere approached JM Coetzee “in an atypical process” to provide her with a text, which would inspire her artwork. The story he sent to her, titled “The Old Woman and the Cats” has been included in the catalog. Just as the old woman in Coetzee’s story cares for beings “without value anymore”, so in De Bruyckere’s sculpture nurses have looked after the tree. Both also deal with uprootedness.
Douglas also provides snippets from De Bruyckere’s correspondence with Coetzee over the artwork:
Several years ago, the Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere was driving to her country house in Burgundy, France, when she came across what was left of an enormous tree that had been uprooted by a storm. Last November, she wrote about that experience in a letter to the South African-born, Adelaide, Australia-based novelist J.M. Coetzee. “The image came to mind of a collapsed cathedral, the roof vault thrown to the floor. …The tree ripped to pieces (a symbol of life, unrecognizably destroyed), the collapsed cathedral, the limitations of the human being…”
That letter and others between the artist and writer are reprinted in the catalogue for “Cripplewood,” Ms. De Bruyckere’s presentation in the Belgian pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which opened to guests of the Biennale’s preview this week. The invitation for Ms. De Bruyckere to represent Belgium came last July, she told The Observer in an interview at the pavilion on Wednesday. Given the time-consuming nature of her practice, she wanted to work with a curator who would provide a sense of continuity. She had recently finished a book project with Mr. Coetzee—she’s long been given to collaborations with artists from other disciplines, such as dance—and felt the relationship could continue to be fruitful. So she invited him to be the pavilion’s curator (the commissioning entity is Ghent, Belgium’s S.M.A.K. museum) in an atypical process: he would provide a text, and her work would react to it.
View a photo gallery of “Cripplewood” from Designboom:
cripplewood’ is a enormous wax installation that accurately reproduces a vast fallen tree trunk, with more wax branches twisted round it and weighted with sand sacks and torn material. an enormous, gnarled and knotted, uprooted elm tree, merging into a mass of trunks and limbs with an almost disturbing resemblance to the muscles, tendons and bones of the human form. the work by artist berlinde de bruyckere is exhibited in a setting that does not actually use any electric light but has been made by covering the belgium pavilion’s large skylight in hessian sacking. the curator, the writer J.M. coetzee (winner of the 2003 nobel prize for literature) describes it as a monstrous, melancholic, poetic work that speaks of death, decay, and dashed dreams. philippe van cauteren, S.M.A.K. (the museum of contemporary art in ghent) artistic director, is co-curator.
cripplewood’ is a enormous wax installation that accurately reproduces a vast fallen tree trunk, with more wax branches twisted round it and weighted with sand sacks and torn material. an enormous, gnarled and knotted, uprooted elm tree, merging into a mass of trunks and limbs with an almost disturbing resemblance to the muscles, tendons and bones of the human form. the work by artist berlinde de bruyckere is exhibited in a setting that does not actually use any electric light but has been made by covering the belgium pavilion’s large skylight in hessian sacking. the curator, the writer J.M. coetzee (winner of the 2003 nobel prize for literature) describes it as a monstrous, melancholic, poetic work that speaks of death, decay, and dashed dreams. philippe van cauteren, S.M.A.K. (the museum of contemporary art in ghent) artistic director, is co-curator.Book details
- Cripplewood / Kreupelhout by JM Coetzee, Berlinda de Bruyckere
EAN: 9780300196573
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- The Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee
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EAN: 9781846557385
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- Here and Now: Letters (2008 – 2011) by JM Coetzee, Paul Auster
EAN: 9780670026661
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- JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing by JC Kannemeyer
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EAN: 9781868424955
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Image courtesy Designboom