Frieze Writer’s Prize 2015

Berlinde de Bruyckere. The Embalmer

Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria

April 18 – July 5, 2015


There is a photograph of Berlinde de Bruyckere standing inside Cripplewood, a huge felled tree made of wax. She’s stuffing her arms into a wound the work offers up to her. Sleeves rolled up, muscles contracted. Like an experienced vet delivering a calf, one arm almost completely disappears inside the wound while the other is focussed on pushing it open. Lips pressed together, her gaze is utterly absorbed by what she sees. 

This moment illustrates poignantly how the artist collaborates, coexists and suffers with her oeuvre. She’s the mother, the nurse, the surgeon. The embalmer. 

Cripplewood is one part of The Embalmer at Kunsthaus Bregenz showing works from the past four years gravitating around the tropes of mythology, transformation and the liminal space between life and death. 

Exhibited are anthropomorphic bodies, stacks of antlers, piles of hides, as well as an enormous, 18-meter-long uprooted tree. All made of wax.

Yet this is not the wax of Madame Tussauds, nor the wax of the idealised anatomical specimens of the Josephinum. These works are not simulacra, the wax is not meant to seduce and deceive with hyperrealism, this is no trompe-l’oeil. On the contrary: This wax is deformed, the shapes contorted. Yet with its carnation in the hues of human skin in the stages of injury, death and decay it works as a powerful repoussoir rendering visible our mortality. 

Like an alchemist, de Bruyckere paints her body parts with a translucent, iridescent epidermis by adding layer upon layer of encaustic - in the visceral pink, blue and greenish shades of haematoma, veins and bruises. She also distorts, thickens or stretches them to achieve the haunting tautness of skin. These bodies are architecture, their insides are not hollow lies.

The two Liggende are acephalous bodies with protruding bones, muscles and arteries. Like an exoskeleton or a cordyceps, antlers and branches grow out of and into their wax bodies. One doesn’t need a gaping mouth or wide-open eyes rolling back in the ecstasy of pain to feel empathy and to recognise one’s humanity within them. One just needs to trace the mutilated surface of their bodies, see the stitches and look into the gashes readily opening up for inspection. One feels connected to the Liggende because they have a corporeality similar to ours - however alien and hybrid they first seems. In their facelessness, their suffering is a proud ecce homo rendered historic and human, all too human.

Resemblance can even occur with the antlers in Actaeon. In Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, Actaeon watches Diana bathe and is punished by being turned into a deer and torn to pieces by his own dogs.

For de Bruyckere, all that remains of Actaeon are his antlers. The velvet still bleeding and sentient in places, they have been carefully bandaged and softly placed on cushions like ex-voto. These antlers are healing from the recurring ordeal of being shed and render visible a process normally concealed: the transmutation of life into new life. 

Filling an entire floor, Cripplewood lies before us like the gigantic corpse of a tree cast entirely in wax, uprooted, gnarled, cruelly atrophied from its natural context, writhing and arching its back and rearing up one last time.

Its many wounds, its “crippled” wood, are as obvious as the fact that someone has been here before us to nurse this huge creature, bandages have been wrapped around amputated branches, gauzes applied, cushions placed for support. What remains is the silence after the suffering of being trapped in the wrong form. Something that resonates strongly in Ovid’s tale of arborification, when Daphne implores the gods: “Change my form, whence all my sorrows come!"

If being human means enduring the human form with all its limitations, its pains and celebrate it in all its variations then there is room for endless possibility, substance for ever new life, templates for ever new forms. 

In Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ it’s decided that the apple lodged in Gregor’s side should “remain there as a visible reminder of his injury.“ De Bruyckere’s work is this apple, a memento mori, a reminder of a very universal and timeless injury, an ontological and archaic pain that will neither heal nor go away since its presence guarantees change. 

—Susanne Gerber, July 2015, photo by Mirjam Devriendt, courtesy Hauser & Wirth