Sculptor Begga D’Haese and grandmother Delphine Lecompte passed away

D’Haese was born on April 18, 1934 in Aalst, the youngest of ten children. At the age of twenty she married Herman Le Compte, with whom she went to the Belgian Congo, where he was a doctor. The couple had nine children and also adopted a son. She was also the grandmother of Delphine Lecompte, the Bruges poet.

Giant ‘Blaiberg’ sculpture and marble chess sets

Begga, who comes from an artistic family, started sculpting in 1969. Her first sculpture was four meters high and weighed 1,000 kilograms. She named it ‘Blaiberg’, in honor of the 50-year-old dentist Philip Blaiberg who received a new human heart implanted in Cape Town in 1967 by Dr. Christiaan Barnard and lived with it for another nineteen months. ‘Blaiberg’ still stands for the Free Technical Institute in Veurne.

After working in metal for several years, she switched to marble sculptures with soft, flowing lines and sensual shapes. Her marble chess sets are well known, which were exhibited at the Kunstmesse in Basel (Switzerland) and at the Art Expo in New York.

Cause of death unknown

After her marble period, she made dozens of female figures and more than 100 wooden sculptures that she called ‘trees’ with hammer and chisel. In recent years she has made delicate collages in which she often interweaves texts from her eldest son Jeroen.

Begga D’Haese died on Thursday in Ghent. A cause of death was not disclosed.