Pieter Vanden Daele

Born in 1971 in Oudenaarde, a small town in Flanders located on the banks of the Scheldt, Pieter Vanden Daele still lives and works there today.

Passionate about the underwater world and its amazing fauna, he makes it his favorite artistic subject. Alongside this fascination, he trained for many years at the Oudenaarde Academy in painting, also learning the art of foundry, molding, wax sculpture, polishing and the patina. In 2003, he had the idea of merging his two passions and began to make sculptures of fish, especially carp.

The first step in his creation process is to make wax models. In order to make the skin and the scales of his fish, he uses a multitude of organic materials found in nature, such as leaves, wood, and leather. The rendering is striking, giving each of his fish a liveliness for l eternity in bronze. The originality of his artistic work is also due to the rich and varied patina that he uses and creates himself. Since 2014 he has started making frogs, again using the same technique. Most of his sculptures are bronzes.

His works are regularly shown in galleries in Belgium, the Paus-bas, England, France, the United States, Canada and Russia.