Babette Degraeve

Babette Degraeve (Bruges 1965) can just fall in love, she says. On materials. And shapes. Then she wants to do something with it. Then she has to do something with it. She even gets a little greedy sometimes, she admits. But not to keep. To share when the work is done. To hit.

She hits with contradictions. An apparently cute cuddly rabbit on a baby blue cushion turns out, on closer inspection, to be a top-heavy, spiky thing. There’s nothing to hug. Little is what it seems in her world.

She also hits with vulnerability. With guileless playfulness, innocence, open-mindedness. In the dogs who – sometimes frisky, sometimes defenseless – do what they do best: be a dog. In the ‘little boys inside’, who sometimes tackle life with curiosity, and other times emerge in all their purity into the adult. Finally, she also hits because her work comes from her heart. There is endearment, there is emotion, there is a wink – humor is also a material. Yes, little is what it seems, but there is no pretense.

Babette Degraeve is the daughter of an architect and the granddaughter of a carpenter. As a young girl she saw how her father designed houses: from the inside out. And in her grandfather’s workshop she surrendered to the tantalizing smell of wood, the sensuality of materials, the wonderful efficiency of tools. After her studies at the Arnhem Art Academy (Artez), she gradually focused on bronze sculptures.

All Babette Degraeve’s sculptures are currently on display at Sille Gallery.