BRUGES.- This year, the 25th edition of Sculpture Link takes place from the 15th June to the 15th August. As a result of this jubilee, every art lover who wants to can visit and enjoy unique sculptures by two internationally renowned female artists, in particular, the American, Carole Feuerman and the Italian, Rabarama. Both illustrate the age-old theme of woman and the female nude in a striking and idiosyncratic manner. From the Venus of Willendorf to today, women have occupied a prominent place in the visual language of almost every civilisation. She symbolises fertility, motherhood, a harmony of shapes, beauty, strength, intelligence and spirituality, as well as seduction and perversity. Her being is central to many aspirations and is both vulnerable and highly exalted at the same time. Poets surround her with words and exquisite sentences. Visual artists approach her with trepidation and passion, with images of desire and worship. The jubilee picture walk will seduce viewers with 25 monumental works that sing about the beauty and radiance of women, while illustrating the visual personality of the picture makers at the same time.

Carole Feuerman (1945, Hartford, Connecticut, USA) is an important advocate of hyper-realism and an extremely successful icon of a civilisation that is also our own. She is an extremely versatile artist. She paints, draws, designs installations and models life-sized and monumental sculptures in plastic and bronze. One of her main themes is that of swimmers and bathers. Her characters incarnate, in part or otherwise, strength, youthful charm and elegance, displaying a precise realistic rendering whilst evoking at the same time, the aesthetics of the female body, with the face reflecting calm self-assurance, triumph, depth and spiritual balance. Her figures, all elegant, fit wonderfully into Sculpture Link near the sea. Carole Feuerman works in New York and Miami. In 2013, her sculptures were on display in the Gardens of the Venice Biennial. She had already exhibited before this, and has done since, and has also been shown in numerous major museums throughout the USA, as well as in Europe, at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, in China and in South Korea. She has received numerous prestigious awards. Her works have been included in major collections, including those of the former president of the USA, Bill Clinton, Dr. Henry Kissinger and the Emperor of Japan. Her presence at Knokke-Heist can be considered as an eloquent and highly exalted event.

The work of an artist born in Rome in 1969 - Rabarama - pseudonym Paola Epifani, who lives and works in Padua, is also dedicated to the female body, but in a very special way that intrigues and commands admiration due to its language and material appearance. Her figures take on unusual postures to varying degree and are immediately popular with their formal beauty and bronze skin, filled with motifs and notches, colourful decorative elements and a type of mesh that covers the entire image, granting it a somewhat surprising presence. She sculpts in clay, sculpts in stone and marble, paints her bronzes, creates jewellery, etches and paints. Her sculptures exhibit a multitude of postures that are striking, and by virtue of their complex design language, also have something clear and meaningful to say. They surprise and intrigue; they generate alienation, because in addition to the speaking figure, the painted body also evokes an unexpected atmosphere with its own rhythm. The artistic collaboration with Cirque du Soleil was, moreover, remarkable and highly memorable.

The walk (or bike ride) runs along the sea dyke from Het Zoute towards Heist-West, and ends at CC Scharpoord, where from the 11th to the 15th August, the 43rd edition of Art Nocturne Knocke takes place. At the Bel-Air Fine Art stand, with whom Sculpture Link is collaborating this year, you can get further acquainted with the works of Feuerman and Rabarama, although in smaller formats.