Wim Delvoye to exhibit at Louvre

At the end of May Wim Delvoye’s exhibition opens at the Louvre in Paris, but he has already met with the French press at his studio in Gentbrugge and his castle in Kwatrecht. The theme of his exhibition portrays ruins and reconstruction. “The problem with today’s society,” says the artist, “is that we want to preserve or reconstruct everything. If the Persians did not destroy the Acropolis, Pericles and Phidias would not have been able to create anything better. But we dare not demolish anything because subconsciously we know that we are no longer as good as our predecessors.”
Delvoye has a myriad ideas, but each proposal requires many allowances. So far agreement has been reached on the 8-metre high Gothic inox spindle, which is to be placed under the pyramid of the Louvre Museum. Delvoye refers to his sculpture as a suppository. The association with his famous work, the digestive machine ‘Cloaca’, springs to mind. His studio is filled with works that could also be exhibited at the Louvre, but he has not made any final choice. One of his showpieces is Mercurius Rorschach, a deformed, duplicated version of the work of the16th Century Flemish artist Jean de Bologne, who hailed from Douai. Delvoye’s exhibition opens on 30 May.