The spaces of GALLERIA CONTINUA in San Gimignano recently hosted the inauguration of two personal exhibitions: Same Old, Same Old by Berlinde De Bruyckere and Instrument by Zhanna Kadyrova. This follows the earlier opening of Yoan Capote’s works in the Gallery’s central spaces, which are still on view.
The exhibitions, which opened on January 24th, brings together two artists from different contexts and generations, united in speaking of what remains once conflict has finished devouring reality. Their dialogue manifests as a clash between symbolic flesh and political stone.
Berlinde De Bruyckere: The Vulnerable Surface
In Berlinde De Bruyckere’s work, the body is a vulnerable surface exposed to history and time. Her figures, devoid of recognizable identity, appear bent, suspended, faceless, and fragmented. The flesh rendered in wax, fabric, and wood appears alive yet emptied of life itself, losing all specific connotation to become universal matter: first of violence, then of pain. There is no narrative gesture, no intent of mere representation; the body is the story, carrying within itself sickness, war, and death.
De Bruyckere operates on the threshold between the human and the inorganic, between life and relic. Her sculptures do not ask for empathy; they command respect, a mute presence that resists the gaze and forces it to linger. The female body, reduced to weight and volume, becomes a field of political tension: not a speaking subject, but a body traversed, exposed, and held in a state of perpetual vulnerability and judgment.
PH: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
Zhanna Kadyrova: Matter as Witness
Zhanna Kadyrova shifts trauma from the body to matter, transforming everyday objects into direct witnesses of war. In her work, stone, concrete, and architectural fragments take the form of things meant to welcome or support, yet every function is denied. Bread is made of stone, unable to be broken or shared; it is a sign of hollowed survival, of a daily life rendered impracticable by the violence of conflict.
The human body is almost always absent, yet constantly evoked through loss, objects that can no longer be used, touched, or inhabited. Kadyrova works within a deeply political dimension without resorting to direct representation. War manifests as the irreversible transformation of matter, as the loss of any possibility of normalcy. Fragility, in her work, is not an emotion but a historical condition inscribed in the very materials that compose the world.
The Symbolism of the Cage and the Blanket
The works of De Bruyckere exhibited at Galleria Continua belong to an early corpus of her career. Among these are ink drawings on paper titled De vrouw ontvangt de vleugels van de zoon (The woman receives the wings from the son, 1987), alongside collages and mixed media. Large black stains simulate a cage, black voids that foreshadow the cylindrical cages she would create years later, such as Kooi (1989) or Zonder Titel (1990).
What do the symbols of the cage, the blanket, the caravan of blankets, the bed frames, and the dry branches represent? Together, they point to the symbolism of the female figure: forcibly contained, constrained to represent something, a body that must not manifest itself or its feelings. Yet every woman in the world is like one of those blankets: a warm, welcoming, maternal presence, even when motherhood does not define her.
In this woman-blanket metonymy, the female figure is relegated to a cage, reduced to a container, an envelope preserving warmth for others. This objectified symbol transforms into a “caravan.” This woman has not yet found her place in the world; she is forced to wander in a conflict that is simultaneously external and internal.
In POTEN (2000), the female body emerges powerfully, appearing to both hold and expose children sheltered among blankets. These arms, mimicking the natural element of the tree, echo a view of Nature as a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). This analogy between the body and the tree reached its zenith in the monumental Kreupelhout – Cripplewood at the 55th Venice Biennale, where wax and wood trees resembled human veins, entombing human remains as if after a terrible flood, a dramatically powerful work reflecting an artist working with life and death.
In works from 1993 to 1996, De Bruyckere developed structures topped with blankets, later adding realistic feet. These represent Shared Isolation. The blankets create a sharp physical boundary. Even when figures face each other, each is closed in their own cocoon, symbolizing the human condition of being trapped in subjectivity despite proximity.
In Spreken (1999), we see a dialogue between solitudes, a hidden vulnerability. The wool is heavy, raw, and protective. This need for heavy covering suggests a hostile environment or a fragile interior. These blankets are soft shields, protecting from emotional “cold” and the judgment of others. As long as these blankets remain separate, the scene represents the limit of empathy: “I can see you, I can stand with you in the frost of life, but I cannot feel your warmth, nor you mine.”
The structure in Slaapzal IV, where a bed is topped with many blankets featuring large circular holes, evokes fading memory. Like fabric eaten by moths, it is a memory disappearing a victory of violence. Similarly, I never promised you a rose garden (1992), with its lead roses, serves as an archive of memory and desire, frozen in time.
The Bullet Hole and the Territory
What unites Berlinde and Zhanna is real, physical war. The holes both artists incorporate into their works represent a wound inflicted by a faceless entity. The shield we believed was strong reveals its fragility.
For Kadyrova, these holes transform into city maps or vital centers near a river. In her work Souvenir, presented in the Gallery’s Tower space, she offers a poetic meditation on the impossibility of returning to one’s homeland. Seashells, usually objects of leisure and memory, become dense metaphors for an unreachable space, reminding the viewer of what continues to be obstinately stolen.
Kadyrova brings conflict into the realm of chronicle and resistance. Her series Palianytsia or her works with iron and tiles transform the ephemeral into the eternal and heavy. In Instrument (2024), commissioned by the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kadyrova uses war relics found in bombed Ukrainian cities and used them to make the organ pipes, which are in perfect working order. She denounces the “void of the missing note,” forcing us to hear the sound that war makes. After debuting as a collateral event at the 60th Venice Biennale, the organ was installed in the Lviv railway station, turning a space of transit into a place of social encounter where musicians gave life to the instrument for nearly a year.
The Structural Condition of Existence
The dialogue between these two artists exists in a space where external and internal conflict merge. If De Bruyckere digs into the wound of the soul, Kadyrova exposes the wound of the territory; both, however, confront us with the same dehumanized body.
The female body is reduced to a simulacrum, an object of a history that did not ask for permission. De Bruyckere’s cage is not just metal; it is a social perimeter. And then, there are the holes. In this encounter, the void changes nature. It is no longer the wear of time or the bite of melancholy: it is the blast of a bomb, the shrapnel of a mortar, the test of fire that rips through matter and silence.
Here, fragility is not a collapse, but the structural condition of existence. These works do not ask for easy empathy or consolation: they expose a wound that cannot, and must not, be closed.
