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Wim Delvoye (born 1965 in Wervik, West Flanders)[1] is a Belgian installation artist and sculptor.
Delvoye was raised in Wervik, in West Flanders, Belgium. Although he did not have a religious upbringing, he was influenced by the Roman Catholic architecture that surrounded him.[2] Delvoye has said that the pessimistic expectations for Belgian art students freed him, essentially making him realize that he "had nothing to lose".[2]
Delvoye's work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art[3]; MUDAM, in Luxemburg.[4]; and the Museum Tinguely, inBasel, Switzerland. [5]
In 1992, Delvoye presented his work, Mosaic, at Documenta IX, a symmetrical display of glazed tiles featuring photographs of his own excrement.[2]
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Delvoye's Cloaca, is a mechanical installation that turns food into "feces". The food begins at a long, transparent bowl (mouth), travels through a number of machine-like assembly stations, and ends in hard matter which is separated from liquid through a cylinder.[2] Delvoye has stated that everything in modern life is pointless. The most useless object he could create was a machine that serves no purpose at all, besides the reduction of food to waste.[6] A ceiling-mounted version of the Cloaca machine was built specifically for Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art's permanent collection.[7]
Delvoye has tattooed pigs as art beginning in the 1990s. Delvoye described the process of tattooing a live pig, "we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin".[8]
Delvoye also creates “gothic” style work. In 2001, Delvoye, with the help of a radiologist, had several of his friends paint themselves with small amounts of barium, and perform explicit sexual acts in medical X-ray clinics. He then used the X-ray scans to fill gothic window frames instead of classic stained glass. Delvoye suggests that radiography reduces the body to a machine.[2]
Delvoye also works in laser-cut steel to produce sculptures of utilitarian objects typically found in construction (like a cement truck[9]), customized in seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque style. These structures juxtapose "medieval craftsmanship with Gothic filigree".[10]
In a 2013 show in New York City, Delvoye showed intricate laser-cut works combining architectural and figurative references with shapes such as a Möbius band or a Rorschach inkblot.[11]
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