A Flemish artist living and working in the mountains of southern France, whose experience and training includes dance and theatre alongside sculpture, painting and life drawing – this is Rika Deryckere, whose sinuous figures move and bend, grasping, twisting and stretching.

Deryckere was born in Flanders, and grew up near Roubaix on the Belgium–France border. From the late 1970s until the move to the Cevennes in 1994 she studied in Belgium – Ghent, Harelbeke and Kortrijk, the Netherlands, Spain and Cyprus. She began exhibiting in Belgium in 1989 in Belgium, and has since held numerous solo and group shows in Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, and the USA. In 1994 she moved to the Gard region in the mountains of the Cevennes where her brother Johan had been working a small farm since the 1970s; she lived first in Saint Hippolyte‑du‑Fort before settling in Sauve, where she continues to work and exhibit. As well as exhibiting regularly in France, she has worked in the USA and the UK, including lecturing and performing at Slippery Rock in Wisconsin and Bethany Lutheran College in Oshkosh, and the Royal Holloway University in London. Residencies include Grindstone Studios in Missouri in 2012 and Clarinda, Iowa, in 2024.

Rika Deryckere explains, ‘As an artist my chief concern has always been the human figure in motion, physically and emotionally expressing experiences we all share as individuals or as part of a group in our place in the world. Our bodies are our universal connection with each other in space, and since these physical bodies we have reflect our thoughts, our actions, our choices, our environments, I want to explore the human body, sometimes in extreme positions, twisted, compressed, distorted.’

Interestingly her public-facing documentation – CV, catalogues, exhibition materials and interviews – tends to emphasise movement, abstraction and emotional gesture, overlooking the fact that much of her work directly explores sexual intimacy and relationship.

Rika Deryckere’s website, where you can see a wide range of her work including landscapes and still lifes as well as her figurative work, is here.