NEW YORK, NY.- Kasmin opened Les Lalanne: Zoophites, an exhibition in homage to the acclaimed French sculptors Claude and Franois-Xavier Lalanne, drawn entirely from the collection of their eldest daughter, Caroline Hamisky Lalanne. The exhibition includes major works by these inventive artists who consistently defied art-world conventions. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Les Lalanne’s first joint solo exhibition, which opened in Paris in June 1964, this exhibition borrows the title Zoophites, an obsolete French term for invertebrate animals that resemble plants in their appearance or growth patterns. The exhibition is accompanied by a newly commissioned text by curator Paul B. Franklin.
A major highlight of the exhibition is Franois-Xavier’s Grand Chat polymorphe (1998/2008), combining a rotating cat’s head with a fish’s tail, a bird’s wings, and a female pig’s belly and hooves, and opening to reveal a functioning bar cart. Based on a 1968 brass commission for the French architect mile Aillaud and his wife, Charlotte, this work is one of only five realized in a large-scale bronze edition conceived in 1998. Its polymorphic structure makes explicit the inspiration Franois-Xavier drew from the fantastical creatures of ancient mythologies, recalling his upbringing studying classical literature, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and his work as a guard in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries of the Louvre in 1949–50.
Another highlight of the exhibition is Grand Rhinocros V (1994/2000), a unique large-scale bronze sculpture of a rhinoceros, one of Franois-Xavier’s most important motifs. “The rhinoceros remained central to his artistic output,” according to Kathleen M. Morris, curator of Les Lalanne’s recent solo exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2021. Following the critical success of his first rhinoceros sculpture, which opened into a functioning desk and was featured in the 1964 exhibition Zoophites, Franois-Xavier created several large-scale rhinoceroses over the course of his career, found today in major collections, including the Muse des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris. With a shimmering black patina, Grand Rhinocros V is the sole example executed from a 1994 design, which originally was conceived as an edition of 8. Its geometric and abstract forms are indicative of the artist’s inimitable style.
Additional motifs included in the exhibition are Claude’s signature use of the ginkgo leaf, as seen in Les Berces adosses (2015), a unique work recently exhibited at the Clark Art Institute. The ginkgo leaf entered Claude’s visual vocabulary in the mid 1990s, when an American couple—friends and collectors of Les Lalanne—brought her examples of the fanlike foliage gathered during a trip to Japan. Claude initially created jewelry based on the gingko leaf before integrating it on a larger scale into series of chairs, benches, and tables, which would be displayed in landmark exhibitions of her work in the ensuing decades.
Claude’s celebrated use of electroplated crocodile skin is also being featured in the exhibition. Soon after she was given a small stuffed crocodile by a staff member at the Jardin des plantes in Paris in 1972, she began creating furniture that showcased crocodiles. Molded from store-bought taxidermy, Claude’s singular electroplating process fused a copper coating on the forms before finishing them in bronze or aluminum.
Though Franois-Xavier and Claude shared a home, occupied neighboring studios, and exhibited jointly, they seldom worked together. The exhibition includes a few of their rare collaborative creations, including Singe aux nnuphars (2008/2010), comprising a seated monkey designed by Franois-Xavier which supports a circular tabletop of Claude’s water lily leaves; Centaure (moyen) (1995/2008), featuring a human torso and arms by Claude and a horse’s body and legs by Franois-Xavier; and Le Merle perch (2006/2008), depicting a blackbird atop a vertical branch that elegantly captures the exuberance and zeal that define the few projects on which the artists worked collaboratively.
Kasmin has organized over 10 solo exhibitions of Les Lalanne’s work since 2007, both at the gallery and at public venues across the United States, including the Kasmin Sculpture Garden, New York (2021); Getty Station, New York (2013); Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FL (2010–11) and Park Avenue, New York (2009).
Known individually and collectively as Les Lalanne since 1966, Claude’s and Franois-Xavier’s artistic practices were deeply entangled. Their respective creative processes nonetheless remained recognizably distinct over their decades-long careers. Claude’s sculptures typically mimic the flora of her surroundings, such as a ginkgo leaf, a branch, or an apple. Having resuscitated the Renaissance art of casting forms from life, while also employing the more recent technique of electroplating, Claude achieved a delicacy and sensitivity in her work largely unparalleled in cast bronze. By contrast, Franois-Xavier is renowned for his life-size sculptures of animals, a practice inspired in part by his time working as a guard in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries of the Muse du Louvre in Paris. With much time to study the massive Apis Bull, Franois-Xavier would later acknowledge that “the animal world offers an infinite repertory of forms connected to a universal symbolism” that “children as well as adults are sensitive to.” Franois-Xavier’s oeuvre demonstrates his commitment to the artistic tradition of zoomorphism through a Surrealist aesthetic, often making creatures that recall the dreamworlds of Lewis Carroll.
