François-Xavier Lalanne

In 1949 he set up his studio at 11 impasse Ronsin, wall to wall with Brancusi’s. The place was then one of the few in Paris where sculpture was being remade: Magritte and Dalí passed through, Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle would follow. In 1956 he began working alongside Claude Dupuy, whom he married in 1967. They would always sign separately and almost never exhibit apart: they became « les Lalanne », two distinct bodies of work under one roof.

Their first joint exhibition, Zoophites, opened in 1964 at Galerie J in Paris, where Alexandre Iolas took notice of their work. François-Xavier showed the Rhinocrétaire there, a desk lodged in the body of a copper rhinoceros. In 1965 and 1966 came a flock of twenty-four sheep on castors, covered in fleece, fourteen of them headless: they are seats. The principle was settled once and for all. Sculpture is not only looked at, it is lived with; the animal is at once a figure and a piece of furniture, and use, far from diminishing the work, extends it.

From the 1970s the menagerie went out into the street. Two pigeons on the place de la Treille in Fontainebleau, a bird on its nest at La Grande Borne, the harnessed donkey of the Jardin Georges-Brassens, the plant architecture of the Jardin des Halles, the Jardin des Enfants, the homage to Brancusi at the Hôpital des Enfants-Malades, the rêveuse at Le Bon Marché, the fountains and topiary of the place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, a flock outside the museum of modern art in Dunkirk. Beyond France, the Grand Centaure went to Luxembourg and then Taipei, a great carp to the gardens of Monaco, a dove to Jerusalem, a fountain to the open-air museum at Hakone.

His work is held by the Musée national d’art moderne — Centre Pompidou, the Fonds national d’art contemporain, the Mobilier national, the Musée national de céramique at Sèvres and the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, as well as Cooper Hewitt in New York, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and Windsor Castle. In 2026 the gallery devotes to him L’École est dans le pré !, in which the flock returns to a demountable Jean Prouvé classroom.