Wim Delvoye does not decorate; he infiltrates. For over three decades, the Belgian artist has carved, tattooed, welded, and reimagined the banal into something baroquely perverse. Best known to many for tattooing live pigs and constructing a working cloaca machine, Delvoye’s gothic period offers a different kind of subversion, one rooted in craftsmanship, contradiction, and dark beauty.
In his Gothic Works series, Delvoye takes utilitarian objects, dump trucks, tires, ironing boards, shovels, even suitcases, and envelops them in a neo-Gothic exoskeleton. Not as ornament, but as transformation. A hulking Caterpillar excavator becomes a digital cathedral in filigree laser-cut steel. Truck chassis are rendered weightless by their skeletal, cathedral-like tracery. Tires, typically grimy, utilitarian, are obsessively hand-carved with the precision of ivory scrimshaw, their floral patterns erasing any memory of rubber and road.
The effect is deeply destabilizing. These are not objects simply made to look old. They’re cast in the language of medieval architecture, but welded with aerospace engineering. A jewelry series, miniature in scale but no less ambitious, collapses the gothic arch into the wearable, turning necklines into reliquaries. Even domestic tools, a shovel, an ironing board, are swept up in the transformation, recast as ceremonial relics.
There is humour here, certainly, but it’s wry and architectural. Delvoye doesn’t just challenge the distinction between art and design, he obliterates it. Each piece feels like a relic of a parallel world where the Gothic never ended, only evolved to encase machines, not saints.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s an aesthetic insurgency.
