Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye was born in 1965 in Wervik, Belgium. He lives and works between Ghent, Belgium and Brighton, UK.

 

Delvoye appropriates and diverts art-historical styles and motifs to sublimate trivial yet rather unconventional objects, or sometimes even living subjects. Perhaps best known for naturalizing tattooed pigs in China, or mechanically replicating the digestive system to produce real feces within exhibition spaces, his very eclectic and subversive practice spans a wide range of mediums, including drawing, sculpture and installation. Constantly oscillating between antagonistic realms such as the sacred and the profane, or the local and the global, he sarcastically confronts the various myths that feed our contemporary society from religion to science and capitalism via unexpected hybridization. Whether he twists the inkblots of Rorschach psychological tests into sleek bronze idols or cement trucks into laser-cut steel neo-gothic cathedrals, most of his works implement expert craftsmanship along with high technology. Wim Delvoye’s ever-shifting, conceptual-adjacent aesthetics further question the commodification of art by strategically and provocatively escaping any attempt of definitive categorization or labeling.

 

Solo exhibitions of Delvoye’s work have been organized by Castello di Rivoli in 1991, Kunsthalle Nürnberg in 1992 and Open Air Museum Middelheim in Antwerp in 1997. More recent solo exhibitions include those at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts (Belgium, Brussels), Tinguely Museum (Basel, Switzerland), MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg), Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Iran), Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, Russia), Musée du Louvre (Paris, France), Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy) and The Power Plant (Toronto, Canada). Other group exhibitions include the ones at Musée Royal de Mariemont (Belgium), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Lille, France), Kunsthalle Tübingen (Germany), Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, USA), Wilde (Geneva, Switzerland), YUZ Museum (Shanghai, China), The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel), Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (Belgium) and Grand Palais (Paris, France). His work has also been included in the Biennales of Venice, Sydney, Lyon and Shanghai.


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Selected Works

Exhibitions