Wim Delvoye

Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eydne, Dubai
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2012

This work is in very good condition. The colours in the catalogue illustration are very accurate.
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Wim Delvoye’s Dump Truck (Scale Model 1:6) clearly demonstrates the artist’s affinity for complex shapes and commitment to pre-20^th Century workmanship in every intricate, twisting and glorious detail of his stainless steel work. The present work is a masterful example from the Belgian artist’s Gothic works series in which he seamlessly combines the forms of industrial machinery with medieval design. Delvoye transforms a practical vehicle made for waste removal into a perplexing, medieval labyrinth of metal. Reminiscent of the famed gothic steeples of Ghent, this work evokes the essence of early fourteenth century Gothic architecture. Dump Truck is a superb illustration of Delvoye’s continuing commitment to the juxtaposition of two opposites to reveal new meaning. He combines the highly stylized and elaborate architectural style of the past with the practical and inelegant machinery of the present. In doing so, Delvoye challenges the distinction between high and low art and in turn, the status quo.

Delvoye began creatively exploring the tension between opposites early in his career. In one of his earliest series of works, beginning in 1990, the artist employed traditional Dutch craft styles to redesign everyday objects. He transformed blades and shovels using blue Delft enamel and heraldic arms into extraordinarily beautiful ornamental objects. That same year, Delvoye began his monumental work Cement Truck–a life-sized Nissan truck almost eleven feet high carved out of teak wood in a seventeenth century Flemish Baroque style which took nearly nine years to complete. Delvoye chose to construct this colossal work in the former Belgian colony because he was unable to find craftsman skilled enough in his home country to create such elaborate and specialized work. With Cement Truck Delvoye began his full-fledged commitment to setting a new threshold for workmanship in his practice.

Each of his projects is progressively more time consuming than the last. In an interview with The New York Times in 2012, Delvoye explained that this is what sets his works apart from many other artists working today, “I always put extra miles on a project…This is a notion that disappeared in the 20^th Century. You still have luxury products—people are happy to buy a Ferrari and admire the extra miles put into the product—but in the art world it hasn’t been about the extra miles anymore.” Delvoye is certainly an artist who puts in the “extra miles;” his unique body of work has spanned an extraordinary variety of themes. However, not all of his works are as aesthetically pleasing as Dump Truck, as he is also well known for tattooing pigs and his international sensation of Cloaclo machines made to replicate the human digestive system. 

At the turn of the 21^st Century, Delvoye began to create even more sumptuous decorative works. He made the transition from using the Flemish Baroque style into the even older and more extravagant Gothic style as seen in Dump Truck. Delvoye chose the Gothic style because of its complicated aesthetics. With the invention and ubiquitous use of computers in the 21st century he believes there is no point to minimalism. For the first of his Gothic works series he created two computer-generated towers out of steel using modern day metalwork techniques and sparsely titled them Torre. Exhibited in 2009 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the works were aligned with the original architectural purpose of the Gothic style. 

In Dump Truck (Scale Model 1:6), Delvoye is able to achieve an astoundingly beautiful art object that derives from the designs of the past while using the technology and pragmatism of the present. In this object we can lament how true craftsmanship often falls by the wayside in the age of technology. Dump Truck (Scale Model 1:6) is a true testament to Delvoye’s core values as an artist. As the chief curator of the Public Art Fund Nicholas Baume notes “I think people do a double take on works this." He notes that Delvoye has done something special with his mixture of design as he creates, “eccentric collisons between seemingly incompatible styles.” Although Delvoye scrutinizes many different themes in his constantly evolving oeuvre, creating new and unique objects that intertwine the old and new, the practical and the decorative, it is through the craftsmanship and care taken to create these works that Delvoye avoids kitsch and is able to find a bridge between pragmatic objects and ornate aesthetics.