Wim delvoye biography meaning
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WIM DELVOYE
"Don’t fight popular culture; instead grab and chew it," says Wim Delvoye. According to the born Belgian artist, art is one of the ways to chew the global system in which we struggle. He sometimes takes inspiration from computer games, sometimes he transforms Rorschach's ink blots into glossy bronze idols or cement trucks into neo-gothic cathedrals, and sometimes he turns gas cylinders or suitcases into decorative ceramic patterns. In addition to challenging our aesthetic perception by pushing the boundaries, he makes fun of etiquette, traditions, stereotypical cultural and religious symbols, arouses curiosity but somehow manages to entertain with his cynical, subversive and ironic language. In doing so, he combines high technology with a rich craft, allowing for radical transitions between materials and ideas.
"A work of art is interesting only if it disturbs the viewer."
Delvoye believes that art cannot change an individual's life; for him, only life itsel
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Art world prankster, art entrepreneur, and Belgian Conceptual artist Wim Delvoye has redefined what it means to be an enfant terrible in the art world, which if you consider contemporary art these days is a pretty hard feat to master.
Earlier this year he presented a series of his works at Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong. On display was one of his famous ‘Twisted Dumptrucks’ in laser-cut laced steel; a never-before shown series of bas-reliefs; and new bronze sculptures, Janus-like and drawing on the ideas of Rorschach plates. But it is his more controversial works that have won him accolades and a fair number of critics.
During the Documenta IX, he stole the show with his tattooed pigs, which incurred the inevitable wrath of animal activists. Delvoye, a vegetarian has subsequently created a pig ‘art farm&#; in China where he tattoos and &#;harvests his art products&#;. More controversial still is ‘Tim’ (). Known as ‘the man who sold his body to art’, Tim Steiner, tattooed by
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Wim Delvoye
Adolf Loos, the outspoken Austrian designer and critic, argued: “the modern individ who tattoos himself fryst vatten either a criminal or a degenerate.” Loos was writing in , and one can only wonder what he would man of the present day vogue for tattoos that cover an arm and half a torso. He would probably see it as a symptom of a gemenskap that had fallen irreversibly into decadence.
He would find an ally in Wim Delvoye, the Belgian artist being celebrated in an exhibition at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. The major point of difference being that Loos was doing everything in his power to combat this tendency, while Delvoye says: “Bring it on!”
Over the past two decades, Delvoye (b) has systematically explored every social taboo, every tenet bygd which civilization distinguishes itself from barbarism. He has done so in a remarkably civilised manner, drawing on the resources of science and technology, and the traditions of skilled handicrafts to create large-scale works th