Few artists have made nature stranger, or more exuberant, than François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. The couple, known collectively as Les Lalanne, first achieved recognition in the 1960s for their surreal approach to sculpture and design. Their work fused animal and plant life with the human body in dreamlike ways: chicken legs sprouting from a head of cabbage, smirking lips cast onto a bronze apple, a blue bathtub in the form of a hippopotamus. “Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden,” opening on Oct. 8 at the Upper East Side, Manhattan, gallery Di Donna, stages a conversation between the couple’s sculptures and the canvases of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. Organized in conjunction with the London gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts, the exhibition locates a common thread in these artists’ treatment of nature as a key site of transformation and potential. All three “depict not what is but what could be,” says the gallery’s director, Emmanuel Di Donna. Across the works on display in the show, organic life emerges as a whimsical, and at times unsettling, source of creation. Claude’s collared rabbit and François-Xavier’s bronze donkey inhabit a gallery arranged as a garden with ivy and trellises, while Magritte’s works adorn the walls with their trademark blue skies.
“Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden” will be on view from Oct. 8 through Dec. 13, didonna.com.
