ARTISTS
Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind鈥檚 Garden
Di Donna and Ben Brown Fine Arts are proud to present Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind鈥檚 Garden. The exhibition brings together the visionary worlds of Ren茅 Magritte, Fran莽ois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne (known collectively as Les Lalanne)鈥攁rtists who did not merely depict the natural world but reimagined it as a fertile landscape of poetic foresight and surreal transformation.
In the Mind鈥檚 Garden is the first exhibition to place Magritte and Les Lalanne in direct dialogue. Featuring over 50 works of art - including paintings, works on paper, and sculpture - drawn from important private collections, it invites viewers into a world where nature is not fixed but fluid鈥攕haped by vision, memory, and invention. In this garden, the boundaries between the natural and the surreal dissolve, and imagination is the ground from which all things grow.
Taking inspiration from Magritte鈥檚 1936 painting La Clairvoyance, in which the artist paints a bird while contemplating an egg, the exhibition explores the idea of artistic perception as a generative force. For these artists, to see is not to replicate the visible, but to anticipate and reveal the unseen鈥攖o draw forth new realities from the raw material of the world.
Magritte鈥檚 dreamlike compositions bend logic with surgical precision, unsettling the boundary between reality and illusion. In parallel, Les Lalanne reconceive nature through sculpture: Fran莽ois-Xavier鈥檚 fantastical animals double as functional objects, while Claude鈥檚 intricate botanical forms blur the line between plant, body, and artifice. Their works enchant and provoke, rendering nature both tactile and transcendent鈥攆ragments of a garden grown from the imagination.
Their connection runs deeper than shared sensibility. All three artists were concurrently championed and represented by the legendary Greek-American gallerist Alexander Iolas in the 1960s, who recognized their rare ability to transform the real into the revelatory. Through Iolas鈥� sustained support, their work came to inhabit a space where mystery, playfulness, and metamorphosis converge.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue containing texts from leading scholars in Surrealism with a focus on Magritte and Les Lalanne.
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Di Donna and Ben Brown Fine Arts are proud to present Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind鈥檚 Garden. The exhibition brings together the visionary worlds of Ren茅 Magritte, Fran莽ois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne (known collectively as Les Lalanne)鈥攁rtists who did not merely depict the natural world but reimagined it as a fertile landscape of poetic foresight and surreal transformation.
In the Mind鈥檚 Garden is the first exhibition to place Magritte and Les Lalanne in direct dialogue. Featuring over 50 works of art - including paintings, works on paper, and sculpture - drawn from important private collections, it invites viewers into a world where nature is not fixed but fluid鈥攕haped by vision, memory, and invention. In this garden, the boundaries between the natural and the surreal dissolve, and imagination is the ground from which all things grow.
Taking inspiration from Magritte鈥檚 1936 painting La Clairvoyance, in which the artist paints a bird while contemplating an egg, the exhibition explores the idea of artistic perception as a generative force. For these artists, to see is not to replicate the visible, but to anticipate and reveal the unseen鈥攖o draw forth new realities from the raw material of the world.
Magritte鈥檚 dreamlike compositions bend logic with surgical precision, unsettling the boundary between reality and illusion. In parallel, Les Lalanne reconceive nature through sculpture: Fran莽ois-Xavier鈥檚 fantastical animals double as functional objects, while Claude鈥檚 intricate botanical forms blur the line between plant, body, and artifice. Their works enchant and provoke, rendering nature both tactile and transcendent鈥攆ragments of a garden grown from the imagination.
Their connection runs deeper than shared sensibility. All three artists were concurrently championed and represented by the legendary Greek-American gallerist Alexander Iolas in the 1960s, who recognized their rare ability to transform the real into the revelatory. Through Iolas鈥� sustained support, their work came to inhabit a space where mystery, playfulness, and metamorphosis converge.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue containing texts from leading scholars in Surrealism with a focus on Magritte and Les Lalanne.
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Di Donna and Ben Brown Fine Arts are presenting Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind鈥檚 Garden, a major exhibition on view at Di Donna鈥檚 Madison Avenue gallery.
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