Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst

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.

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.