Belém Cultural Center Foundation
Empire Square
1449-003 Lissabon
Portugal
Bruyckere's marbles. Crossing a burning bridge
Crossing a Burning Bridge, the title of Berlinde De Bruyckere's temporary exhibition that opens the Museum of Contemporary Art/CCB, was taken from a short story by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. A powerful and suggestive image of the risk of passing from one shore to another, it is also symbolic of the attraction to the other and the fear of the other, of transformation and metamorphosis, and of the trauma that any migration process implies.
Berlinde De Bruyckere has been developing work in the field of sculpture, drawing, collage, and installation around the great themes of art: death, redemption, sex, pain, and memory. Inspired by the intermediate figure of the angel, this exhibition proposes a reflection on the relationship with the other, whether as transcendence, as the physicality of touch, or as a personal projection. Following the exhibition rooms, the artist explores these themes in works from different moments of her work, looking at their erotic power and ambiguity.
Anchored in the history of art – namely Renaissance painting – Berlinde De Bruyckere's work connects existing archetypes to new narratives, rediscovering themes, obsessions, or recurrences of the world of images that populate our collective memory.
To materialize this dialogue between historical times, the National Museum of Ancient Art lent Lucas Cranach Salome's painting with the head of St. John the Baptist, 1510, which confronts the work Infinitum II, 2017–2019. Continuing this dialogue, the exhibition also includes a hub at the National Museum of Ancient Art, where the work Liggende — Arcangelo I, 2023 will be installed, presented in the room dedicated to Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), a Spanish Baroque painter whose work is a recurring reference for the artist. The sculpture, depicting a fallen angel (therefore, an entity that has passed from transcendence to immanence), is presented in the context of the dialogue with the mysticism of Zurbarán's painting (present in the portraits that try to free themselves from earthly worldliness), performs, once again, the same ambiguous and back-and-forth circuit that the exhibition proposes. The work also has another important aspect: its dimensions reproduce those of Vasco da Gama's tomb in the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon.
