Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need @ Galerie Continua

Berlinda de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Berlinde de Bruyckere's exhibition at Galerie Continua in the Marais is an absolute must see, standing out from plethora of great exhibitions in Paris this Autumn. The work arouses a complexity of emotional and visceral responses with its raw, confrontational sensuality. Wax sculptures of legs below the knee, discoloured skin, aging toenails, cloaked in animal hide, covered in tufts of hair, placed under a bell jar, standing on an old table. A piece such as City of Refuge I (2023), like much of her work, is repulsive and fascinating, clearly fabricated, yet hauntingly real, too close for comfort, yet intimately familiar, sequestered inside a bell jar. The fleshy, disintegrating limbs, body flanks, and sculptures of branches that could also be legs, are sinewy and seductive, pulling us both closer in and forcing us, unwillingly, to step back.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, City of Refuge I (2023)

Need, the title of the exhibition itself is provocative, suggesting desire, compulsion, the craving for physical intimacy, and the repugnance of the body in all its nakedness. And yet, the sculptures are also like bodies, discovered after a long time, rotting, in the cellar after being dismembered by a serial killer. In this sense they cry danger and a ghostly presence of an unknown, but intriguing past, haunted by death. The need of an internal, living disequilibrium together with that of a death awaiting explanation, are pressed together under the bell jars. Their apparently aging plinths and tables making the forms everyday, familiar. In spite of their rich sensuousness, their provocation of much more than sight, they maintain a mystery and something never able to be explained.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Many of the limbs, slices of flesh, or whatever they are, are bound in string, like meat, ready to be sold, eaten, put in the oven. In this, they remind of Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, 1655. But because they are also always on a little plinth, not hanging from meat hooks, the objects function differently. That said, while not on exhibition at Galerie Continua, de Bruyckere has made works that are hung from hooks, as if in an abattoir. But the sculptural objects on display at Galerie Continua, looking like slices of flesh, draped in an exotic fabric, again, make them something to revere, giving them a strange and rare beauty. 

Placing the "specimens" of an unknown origin under glass domes of course complicates their significance. This familiar way to display precious and delicate objects signals that they need to be protected, kept. The bell jar which traditionally maintained a controlled environment, also says that the exotic is something worth looking after. Simultaneously, on display, they draw our eye to their importance as something to be looked at, specimens under glass to be ogled. Today, the glass dome also works very well to create a shine on its surface, making the object underneath appealing, valuable, to be looked at, as if to arouse our need to consume.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Also on exhibition in Need are a number of pieces hung on the wall, looking like wood, merged with flesh, as if the two had grown together. The objects are always in heavy old wooden frames, often with a mirrored backing, or pieces of paper stuck to the back. They reminded me of fragments found in a forest, still alive, or dead and being preserved using flesh for unknown reasons. Other pieces were titled, Plunder, Madonna, and Archangel — suggesting religious connotations, such as sacrifice and worship. 

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Torn cloth in heavy frames likewise reminds of liturgical cloaks, resonating with the drapery around pieces of flesh. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, de Bruyckere installed an exhibition in the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, bringing presence to the pastness and fragility of those involved in the Christian narrative. The fragility and tenderness, vulnerability and suffering of fallen trees, translated into wax by de Bruyckere are nevertheless not referring to institutional doctrine, but rather, the sculptures put human emotion and need at the centre of a religious experience. Even though the religious references are more subtle in the exhibition at Galerie Continua, the power of the emotions elicited by de Bruyckere's sculptures is similarly overwhelming.