Berlinde De Bruyckere: Horse Latitudes
Berlinde De Bruyckere Les Deux 2007 Courtesy Galleria Continua San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin
Old Montreal may be a growing destination for world-class contemporary art, but it remains a tourist magnet in the more traditional sense, full of tchotchke-crammed boutiques, overpriced restaurants, basilica-seeking throngs and carriage-pulling horses—which are often outfitted ignobly in novelty-sized sunglasses, spangled hats and/or dyed-pink manes.
Acclaimed Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere’s current exhibition at Old Montreal’s DHC/ART Foundation (which is running in tandem with its John Currin survey) also employs horses, for the piece Les Deux: a breathtaking, life-sized sculpture made from real horses, which De Bruyckere selected for their shapes when living, and used only after their deaths from natural causes. Underlining the relation between labour and mortality symbolized by the equine, Les Deux suspends two prostrate horses in parallel alignment on scaffolding, their bodies visibly stitched together, hooves and faces removed. In counterpoint (or, perhaps, complement) to their clopping kindred outside the gallery, they are anonymous, stripped, husk-like: the great power of life drained of its essential movement.
| |
|
Berlinde De Bruyckere Invisible Beauty and Invisible Love I and II 2011 Courtesy DHC/ART / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
Two new, wall-mounted sculptures in the same room—Invisible Beauty and Invisible Love I and II—similarly explore the arresting of life, one of figurative sculpture’s everlasting themes. Legs made of layers of wax dangle from metal posts, suggesting torture (especially crucifixion) and decay: the flesh and its frailties frozen in art.
| |
|
Berlinde De Bruyckere 20 2007 Courtesy DHC/ART / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
An adjacent room acts as a showcase for De Bruyckere’s theatrical, museum-like vitrines, which further emphasize her interest in the figure as specimen. 20, again in wax, recalls Francis Bacon in its disturbing merging of two ambiguous forms. 0.28 is a huge cabinet full of trees and, in bottom compartments, blankets. This meditation on nature and colonialism is likewise at home in Old Montreal—once, long before its tourist invasion, a trading post where settlers struggled to keep a variety of fearsome mortal intrusions at bay.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
