Les Lalanne

Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to present Les Lalanne: A Living Landscape, a spectacular exhibition of works by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, presented at the Hong Kong gallery. Bringing together an exceptional group of highly sought-after masterpieces, this blockbuster presentation marks one of the most significant showcases of Les Lalanne ever staged in Asia.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Ben Brown Fine Arts also announces the expansion of its Hong Kong gallery, significantly increasing its footprint to create a larger, more versatile exhibition space, including additional viewing rooms, accommodating increasingly ambitious, museum-quality presentations. The expansion underscores the gallery's sustained commitment to Hong Kong and the wider Asian market, strengthening its role as a trusted platform for international artists and estates, while creating new opportunities for collaboration with collectors and institutions.

Les Lalanne: A Living Landscape inaugurates this new chapter. For the exhibition, the gallery is transformed into an imagined garden inspired by the serene poetry and spatial harmony of the Japanese Zen garden. Visitors step into a contemplative landscape where François-Xavier's monumental animals pause mid-graze, and Claude's botanical forms unfurl and coil, weaving an organic rhythm through the gallery. The result is immersive and theatrical, yet refined, a living landscape shaped by two of the twentieth century's most original artistic voices.

At the heart of the exhibition are two of François-Xavier Lalanne's celebrated Hippopotame Bar (1976), presented alongside Sauterelle Bar (1970). This marks the first time these landmark works have been shown together in Asia. These works reveal Lalanne's rare ability to elevate the everyday into objects that are both irreverent and commanding.

These extraordinary bars will be presented alongside François-Xavier's iconic flock of Moutons, in what will be the largest public presentation of the series ever staged in Hong Kong. Sited across the gallery in a gesture of quiet transhumance, the sheep seem momentarily at rest, as if the flock has briefly settled to graze within the imagined terrain. First conceived in 1965 with Moutons de Laine, the series evolved over decades to include epoxy stone and bronze editions. The exhibition brings together key examples from Les Nouveaux Moutons, including Bélier (1994), Brebis (1994), Agneau (1996) and Le Mouton Transhumant (1988), alongside works from the earlier Mouton de Pierre series (1979–1984). Humorous and quietly radical, the Moutons dissolve the boundary between sculpture and furniture. They invite touch and interaction, embodying Lalanne's ambition to integrate art into everyday life.

In dialogue with François-Xavier's animals are Claude's lyrical explorations of the botanical world. Her celebrated Entrelacs and Ginkgo furniture, flora-adorned Miroirs, electroplated Candelabra and enchanting Choupatte and Pomme sculptures soften the landscape with their sinuous forms and fine detail. Foliage drifts across surfaces in intricate tracery, vines weaving and winding through the space. Branches arc and curl into functional forms, as though they blossomed into being. Informed by close observation of nature, shaped by Art Nouveau and animated by Surrealist wit, Claude's practice transforms plants into objects of delicate enchantment.

The spirit of A Living Landscape is rooted in the Lalannes' home in Ury, France. Their house and garden functioned as a living laboratory where art, animals, family life and craftsmanship existed side by side. The boundary between work and life dissolved. Gardens, especially for Claude, were places of careful balance, cultivated yet free, composed yet alive. That same sense of controlled wildness shapes this exhibition.

Like a Zen garden that distills the natural world into a contained microcosm, the Lalannes distilled nature into objects. Experienced collectively, A Living Landscape transforms the Hong Kong gallery into an immersive environment where sculptural flora and fauna exist in poetic balance, where fantasy and reality converge, and where viewers are invited not simply to observe, but to inhabit this world, and to experience sculpture as something both intimate and alive.

Claude Lalanne (b. 1925, Paris - d. 2019, Fontainebleu) and François-Xavier Lalanne (b. 1927, Argen – d. 2008, Ury), known collectively as Les Lalanne from 1966, were a French artistic duo whose intertwined yet distinct practices developed over more than five decades. They met in 1952 and worked closely together throughout their careers, sharing studios and exhibiting jointly while maintaining individual approaches. Claude, trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, specialised in sculptures and functional objects derived from vegetal forms, employing techniques of casting from life and electroplating. François-Xavier, initially trained as a painter at the Académie Julian, abandoned painting in 1952 to focus on sculpture, becoming known for his life-size animal forms, influenced in part by his time working as a guard in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries of the Musée du Louvre and drawing on the tradition of animal sculpture from Barye to Pompon. The artists lived and worked in Paris, notably at the Impasse Ronsin in Montparnasse, where they were part of a Surrealist-inflected artistic milieu that included Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. Their first exhibition at Galerie J in 1964 led to an international career supported by gallerist Alexander Iolas, and their work soon attracted prominent collectors including Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, Baron Guy and Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, and John and Dominique de Menil. Today, their work has been presented in significant exhibitions across Europe, Asia and the United States, including presentations at the Palace of Versailles, Versailles; Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FA. Their work is held in major museum collections including the National Design Museum, New York; Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York; Museé Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museé Nationale d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.