The Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere was born in Ghent in 1964. Her father was a butcher, so from childhood she was used to seeing corpses. This upbringing gave her a unique insight into anatomy, viscera, and animal skins, which she would bring to her practice of sculpture. De Bruyckere’s subject is mortality, the energy of organic matter. In her first solo exhibition in Galleria Continua’s Marais space, in Paris, she invokes processes that work beneath and beyond language, such as decay and metamorphosis. “It is the ever-recurring horror and beauty that we, as humans, do not fully understand, but of which we are nevertheless a part,” says De Bruyckere. Her oeuvre, rooted in art history and mythology, suspends time. —Maggie Turner