Wim Delvoye
wim delvoye
* born 1977, lives in Zurich/Switzerland
* "Kunstwerk": Tim Steiner
Over the past decade, Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye has become garnered attention in the art world, mainly for his piece Cloaca, a machine that imitated the human digestive process nearly perfectly. His blue-ink paintings – flowery patterns tattooed on the skin of living pigs – are also widely renowned.
In 2005 Delvoye was already combining a fascination for the human body and the art of tattooing by using as a canvas the skin on the back of young Tim Steiner of Switzerland. He thus created an image of the Virgin Mary and of a skull that literally gets under one’s skin. Yet the outcome of his 35 hours of tattooing was not intended to corporeally beautify Steiner; instead, it was sold by Delvoye as a work of art to the Hamburg collector Rik Reinking.
By contractual agreement, Reinking may exhibit the “walking artwork” TIM three times each year as a living work of art. Upon Tim Steiner’s death, the painted section of his skin is to be removed and will become the property of the collector’s estate. But in the meantime, Wim Delvoye and his TIM project will certainly continue to foster discourse and controversy surrounding questions of the nature of this "work of art".