Le Bristol Paris will host several of François-Xavier Lalanne’s most iconic works in its lobby: the Bélier (Ram), the Mouton Transhumant (Transhumant Sheep) and the Agneau (Lamb). Gathered as a flock, these three sculptures, among the artist’s best known, will settle inside the hotel for two weeks, coinciding with Art Basel Paris.
Following Claude Lalanne’s New York Apple, shown in the garden last spring, Le Bristol Paris continues its conversation with the Lalannes’ world. Amid antique busts and Gobelins tapestries, the sheep take their place in the lobby, extending in their own way the meeting of eras and forms that unfolds there every day.
The sheep appeared early in François-Xavier Lalanne’s work and became one of his signature motifs. It grew from the idea of a sculpture that shares the space of the people around it, something a lobby, as a place of passage and encounter, makes possible. In 1965, his Troupeau de Moutons (Flock of Sheep), twenty-four animals on casters that can be moved, grouped, scattered and even used as seats, turned an interior into a landscape. The work no longer sat apart on a plinth. It shared the space and daily life of its owner, challenging the traditional status of sculpture.
The artist would keep returning to the theme. In the late 1970s, the Moutons de Pierre (Stone Sheep) carried the vocabulary of the earliest sheep into a material suited to the outdoors. Epoxy stone combined with bronze gave the animals a sleeker, almost mineral silhouette and made them true garden sculptures. In 1988, the Moutons Transhumants evolved in form and gradually rebuilt a whole animal family.
The Nouveaux Moutons (New Sheep), conceived in the early 1990s, are the culmination of the series. The Bélier, the Brebis (Ewe) and the Agneau, in epoxy stone and patinated bronze, stand out for their pared-down lines: solid, almost mineral bodies offset by bronze heads and legs. This simplicity gives them a presence that is at once familiar, timeless and deeply sculptural.
Conceived as a family rather than as individual pieces, they take possession of a space and engage with their surroundings, indoors or out. At Le Bristol Paris, they embody Lalanne’s ambition to dissolve the boundaries between sculpture, furniture and landscape, and to bring art into everyday life with as much poetry as ease.
On November 24, Christie’s Paris will present more than 200 works spanning a century of decorative arts and design, including François-Xavier Lalanne’s Nouveaux Moutons. From the Belle Époque to contemporary creation, the selection shows how great designers keep reinventing bronze: as functional sculpture for the Giacomettis, as a poetic bestiary for the Lalanne, and as architectural material for Ingrid Donat and Maarten Baas.
