Berlinde de Bruyckere

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Berlinde De Bruyckere (1964, Ghent, Belgium) is an artist based in Ghent.

She specialises in sculpture in various media including wax, wood, wool, horse skin and hair, though she also works in watercolour and gouache. Her work typically deals with issues of loneliness, pain and death,^[1] and since the early 1990s many of her major works have featured structures involving blankets. Their use is symbolic both of warmth and shelter, and of the vulnerable circumstances such as wars that make people seek such shelter.^[2]

In 2000, her work with five dead horses, In Flanders Fields, a commentary on World War I, was exhibited at the In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres. She gained international acclaim at the 2003 Venice Biennale, when her sculptures were shown in the Italian Pavilion. Since then, her solo exhibitions have included ones at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (2004); La Maison Rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris (2005); and De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg (2005). In 2006 her work was included in the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art and exhibited in a two-artist show at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.