Dialectical Dreamer: Wim Delvoye
-
Wim Delvoye is a trickster, a storyteller, a problem solver, a systems maker, and a businessman -- but it's only through the guise of an "artist" that he can embody all of these identities at once. And if you asked Delvoye, the artist is coming of age. "We have seen the collector as the star before, the gallerist as the star before, the curator as the star, the writer as the star, and now I'm expecting -- we have seen many signs on the wall -- that the artist will finally be the star."
Born in 1965 in Wervik, Belgium, Wim Delvoye has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale in Italy, Documenta IX in Germany, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He has generated an impressive and wide-ranging oeuvre, with works including anal kisses (blooming, lipsticked prints of women's rectums); wooden birdhouses kitted out in studded S&M inspired harnesses; football goals with stained glass depictions of everyday life and religious figures; drawings of Disney characters portrayed in crucifixion scenes; sculptures of construction vehicles rendered in ornate, laser-cut steel; live pigs tattooed with Louis Vuitton logos; and, his most famous project, Cloaca, a series of incredibly complex gastronomic machines that process food and excrete true-to-life feces.