"For much of her career, the artist has used wax to form misshapen, tortured bodies that are the antithesis of the heroic bodies of classical art. These cadaverous, tragic figures are at once hyperrealistic and impossibly contrived; composed of absences, often lacking heads, they also appear to have been deprived of innards and bones. They are marked by the touch of real bodies; De Bruyckere makes casts of body parts that she reworks and combines in assemblages that connote the presence of a real body whilst presenting incontrovertible evidence of its absence.
De Bruyckere robs monumental sculpture of its grandeur through the unsettling material of wax, a gummy, fleshy substitute for the traditional materials of sculpture—bronze and marble—and the inglorious, recycled furnishings that her figures squat upon or drape across. The uncanny effect of De Bruyckere’s waxes is considerable; they inspire horror and pity in the viewer, who is confronted by an object that suggests the disquieting presence of a corpse. This waxen residue appears to be the substance of a history of atrocity, a monument to a mute, traumatic past that trespasses on the present, unsummoned."
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