Berlinde De Bruyckere & Philippe Vandenberg: Innocence Is Precisely: Never to Avoid the Worst is an artist’s book published on the occasion of the duo exhibition of the same name. The exhibition was held in 2012 in Museum De Pont, Tilburg. The book includes a selection of works on paper by Philippe Vandenberg and Berlinde De Bruyckere. Curated by De Bruyckere herself, the exhibition confronted 70 works by Vandenberg with her own work to enhance a dialogue between their oeuvres.
Philippe Vandenberg (Ghent, 1952 – Brussels, 2009) was a foremost Belgian painter, whose oeuvre presented a series of radical stylistic and thematic shifts, reflecting both a personal trajectory and responses to varying socio-cultural changes. The creative basis of Berlinde De Bruyckere’s drawings, sculptures and installations, is rooted in her childhood, and has been layered over with subsequent experiences and ideas. Its figurative points of departure render her work highly recognizable. Even though their oeuvres are so divergent in approach, sensibility, imagery, style, iconography, they show some strong affinity.
As far as the content of their work is concerned, the two artists share parallel existential views, as well as a deep interest in the literary world, in the history of Western art, and in the traditions of religious imagery. The starting point is Berlinde De Bruyckere’s intuitive selection from Philippe Vandenberg's legacy of drawings. For more than one year she leafed through his work. From the extensive amount of drawings that he left behind, she selected about 70 items and joined them to a selection from her own drawings.
This book is the reflection of a meeting. It is a dialogue, not between artists who may, or may not, have known each other, but between their corpus of drawings.
