Buyers and viewers have been flocking to Sotheby’s for the private selling exhibition “Les Lalanne: The Poetry of Sculpture,” which opened late last month and runs through this Friday (November 22). The exhibition, which was curated by avid Lalanne collector Michael Shvo working with New York dealer Paul Kasmin, features a broad sampling of married artist duo Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne’s whimsical, iconic animal and flora sculptures, including sheep, bears, bunnies, apples and a never-before exhibited bronze ram “Mouflon de Ram Island (grand),” (1999) and “Vache Bien Etablie,” the latter of which is a bronze cow-turned-table.
Nearly half of the 36 works were sold within days of the October 31 opening (prices range from $20,000 to $1.5 million), and a higher-than-average level of over 3,000 visitors have come to the show at Sotheby’s, a spokesperson confirmed, which was held under the auspices of its S|2 private sale and gallery arm. Further enticing viewers was the transformation of the exhibition space into a “midnight garden,” with deep blue walls and ample greenery at a cost of more than $120,000, according to Shvo. “The setting is magical,” said Shvo, who helped source the hard-to-find works from private collections. “We were determined to create something spectacular,” he added. “My feeling is that if you do something you go all the way or you don’t do it all.”
Shvo, a real estate developer, explained that the show was timed to take advantage of the traffic Sotheby’s typically generates during its fall auction season, “when every big collector is in New York with their minds focused on art.” The plan was successful, in part, because it “introduced Lalanne to a group that didn’t necessarily know this body of work,” Shvo pointed out — and further, who wouldn’t necessarily make a trip to a gallery to see it.
François-Xavier gained renown for his oversize animals that often contain secret compartments or double as functional furniture, while Claude was recognized for flora-inspired sculptures such “L’Homme à Tete de Chou,” (a man with the head of a cabbage) that was featured on French artist Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 album of the same name.
The S|2 show comes on the heels of Shvo’s already wildly popular “Sheep Station,” public art exhibition, in which he and Kasmin placed more than two dozen sheep sculptures by François-Xavier in a Getty gas station-turned-grass station in West Chelsea, complete with sloping hills on which the sheep are perched. (Shvo has purchased the property, which sits under the High Line park, and plans to turn the site into luxury residences.)
Though the Getty exhibition is non-commercial, Shvo said that it “clearly brought the sheep to the public in a very large way, and it quickly went viral.” He added that visitors from around the world — ranging from Ecuador to Russia to Paris to London — have turned out to see it, and that heavy usage of social media along with traditional media has resulted in worldwide distribution of images from the show.
