Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New YorkAn installation view of Wim Delvoye’s “Suppo (scale model 1:2),” 2013.The Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is known for making his friends perform sexual acts in front of X-ray machines, tattooing live pigs to look like Louis Vuitton handbags (and selling the hides and taxidermied animals from his farm in China) and finding the “humanness” in processes, like digestion, that don’t exactly scream “artful.” But the show he opened last weekend at the Bowery gallery Sperone Westwater suggests a new maturity.
The touchstones are two monumental sculptures. “Suppo (scale model 1:2)” hangs from the double-height ceiling like a pendulum. Made with a state-of-the-art laser cutter and using the Cologne Cathedral as a reference, the stainless steel mega-structure is an elongated and spiraling piece that looks like a building that’s been pushed through a manhole. While not as epic as Delvoye’s first iteration of the piece, which was twice the size and hung from the glass pyramid of the Louvre last year, this version is still awe-inspiring. It’s at once classical and futuristic — gothic oratory meets Millennium Falcon.
Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York“Dual Möbius Quad Corpus,” 2013.The second sculpture, “Dual Möbius Quad Corpus,” depicts four Jesuses, four nails and one crucifix in an endless polished bronze Möbius band, the stretched and twisted bodies and contorted hands and feet tangled together. Although it’s not as formally arresting as “Suppo,” it’s another example of Delvoye’s tendency to toy with sacred symbols.
Upstairs, Delvoye’s take on Moreau-style 19th-century marble and bronze sculptures — known for their saccharine love scenes and wistful women — merge kitsch, psychology and mythology into a spiraling nickeled bronze explosion. “Deux Bacchantes Rorschach” is a Hindu goddess in Art Deco form, with dancerlike arms and heads protruding from the base. In two more works, Delvoye applies the crucifix scene to a double helix, cleverly marrying religion and science in a thorned glory. “La Lune Rorschach,” a 3-D version of a Rorschach blot that depicts two bodies seemingly merging into one another, offers the clearest connection to the Belgian provocateur’s earlier pieces. It shows two bodies seemingly merging into one another and feels oddly erotic, despite being under the pretense of a 3-D Rorschach blot. In some ways, it sums up Delvoye’s current mind-set: refined, even subdued, but still risqué and obsessed with the body.
“Wim Delvoye” is on view at Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, New York, through June 28; speronewestwater.com