‘I want to show how helpless a body can be’ — Berlinde De Bruyckere.

I find most Catholic religious art attached to various moods of sadomasochism. Stations of the Cross itself is an atrocious narrative. Most Counter-Reformist art exhibits this permanent trauma associated with the Roman Church in multiple ways, both in painting and in sculpture. Most of the militant Counter-Reformist iconography and representation, opposed to both Muslim and Protestant iconoclasticism, is dramatically visual. It is even frightful, yet an essential pious decoration of any cathedral or small chapel interior. For those who regularly attend Church practices, this dramatic imagery becomes invisible to them with time. For non-believers or practitioners of different religions, it is not easy to escape from this kind of subject matter and rhetoric. Only artists (a few of them, let us make it clear) manage to liberate themselves from the Text and Ideology ordered by who pays for the artworks.

Some artists, although only a few, achieved a high degree of liberation and autonomy from the dominant iconological power, the Roman Catholic Church. Berlinde De Bruyckere, who, as a contemporary artist, does not depend on patrons as far as subject matter matters but still seems to live under the long arm of the Catholic spell, may be critically related to the following European artists:

From the Netherlands and modern Belgium:

Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, James Ensor, Paul Delvaux, René Magritte, Luc Tuymans, …

From other Western countries:

Donatello, Andrea Mantegna, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Medardo Rosso, Kathe Kollwitz, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Gober, …

Berlinde De Bruyckere. Khorós | Bozar Brussels
https://share.google/ANwskkckpKCMW1YZC

Berlinde De Bruyckere. Hauser & Wirth
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2782-berlinde-de-bruyckere/