Wim Delvoye

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Wim Delvoye
Wim Delvoye - Charleroi - BPS22 - 2015-09-25 - 1.jpg
Wim Delvoye in 2019
Born1965 (age 59–60)
Wervik, Belgium
Education Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium
Known for Sculpture

Wim Delvoye (born 1965 in Wervik, West Flanders) [1] is a Belgian installation artist and sculptor.

Contents

Early life

Delvoye was raised in Wervik, in West Flanders, Belgium. Although he did not have a religious upbringing, he was influenced by the Roman Catholic architecture that surrounded him. [2] Delvoye has said that the pessimistic expectations for Belgian art students freed him, essentially making him realize that he "had nothing to lose". [2]

Career

Delvoye's work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art [3] ; MUDAM, in Luxemburg. [4] ; and the Museum Tinguely, inBasel, Switzerland. [5]

In 1992, Delvoye presented his work, Mosaic, at Documenta IX, a symmetrical display of glazed tiles featuring photographs of his own excrement. [2]

Delvoye's Cloaca is on permanent display at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Berriedale TAS 7011, Australia - panoramio (2).jpg
Delvoye's Cloaca is on permanent display at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Delvoye's Cloaca , is a mechanical installation that turns food into "feces". The food begins at a long, transparent bowl (mouth), travels through a number of machine-like assembly stations, and ends in hard matter which is separated from liquid through a cylinder. [2] Delvoye has stated that everything in modern life is pointless. The most useless object he could create was a machine that serves no purpose at all, besides the reduction of food to waste. [6] A ceiling-mounted version of the Cloaca machine was built specifically for Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art's permanent collection. [7]

Delvoye has tattooed pigs as art beginning in the 1990s. Delvoye described the process of tattooing a live pig, "we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin". [8]

Delvoye also creates “gothic” style work. In 2001, Delvoye, with the help of a radiologist, had several of his friends paint themselves with small amounts of barium, and perform explicit sexual acts in medical X-ray clinics. He then used the X-ray scans to fill gothic window frames instead of classic stained glass. Delvoye suggests that radiography reduces the body to a machine. [2]

Delvoye also works in laser-cut steel to produce sculptures of utilitarian objects typically found in construction (like a cement truck [9] ), customized in seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque style. These structures juxtapose "medieval craftsmanship with Gothic filigree". [10]

In a 2013 show in New York City, Delvoye showed intricate laser-cut works combining architectural and figurative references with shapes such as a Möbius band or a Rorschach inkblot. [11]

Selected public collections

References

  1. 1 2 "Wim Delvoye". Guggenheim Museum (collection search. Retrieved 15 September 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Amy, Michaël (20 January 2002). "The Body As Machine, Taken To Its Extreme". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
  3. ↑ Michel Dewilde : Wim Delvoye at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art ‘About continuous folding, connecting and twisting.’
  4. ↑ "Wim Delvoye". English. 2 July 2016. Retrieved 28 March 2024.
  5. ↑ "wim-delvoye | Museum Tinguely Basel". www.tinguely.ch. Retrieved 28 March 2024.
  6. ↑ Grimes, William (30 January 2002). "Down the Hatch". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
  7. ↑ "A "Subversive Disneyland" at the End of the World". Archived from the original on 12 January 2015.
  8. ↑ Laster, Paul (30 September 2007). "Bringing Home the Bacon: Wim Delvoye". Sperone Westwater. ArtAsiaPacific. pp. 154–159. Archived from the original on 20 August 2013.
  9. ↑ "Cement Truck". Archived from the original on 11 February 2012.
  10. ↑ "Home". publicartfund.org.
  11. ↑ Cashdan, Marina (16 May 2013). "New Provocations From the Belgian Bad Boy Wim Delvoye". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
  12. ↑ "Wim Delvoye". SMAK Museum. Retrieved 15 September 2025.
  13. ↑ "Wim Delvoye (Concrete Mixer)". Stedelijk Museum. Retrieved 15 September 2025.
  14. ↑ "Wim Delvoye (Chapel)". MUDAM Museum. Retrieved 15 September 2025.
  15. ↑ "Wim Delvoye (Collection search)". Centre Pompidou. Retrieved 15 September 2025.
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