François-Xavier Lalanne

Born August 28th, 1927, in Agen, France and died December 7th, 2008, in Ury, France

François-Xavier Lalanne is a french sculptor whose work has almost always been presented alongside his wife’s, Claude Lalanne. Since the 1950s, the Lalannes have developed two parallel works made up of surrealist associations, full of humor and poetry, but each according to its own modus operandi. In Daniel Abadie's publication on the Lalanne, he writes that “the work of Claude Lalanne, like that of François-Xavier Lalanne, obviously has its own specific identity under the common signature. There can be no confusion between their very different approaches to sculpture - molding and assembly for her, drawing and construction for him - nor between their universes - classical and architectural for François-Xavier, organic and baroque for Claude. And yet, in the eyes of the public, the unity of their signatures has long been enough to make their works indistinguishable, as if from a single mold” (1).

Somewhere between surrealist humor and formal rigor, François-Xavier's bestiary is part of a twentieth-century aesthetic tradition ranging from Pompon to Brancusi, who was his studio neighbor in Montparnasse. Famous for his half-sculptural, half-furniture works such as Rhinocrétaire (a sculpture/desk), Moutons de laine (sculptures/armchairs) and Gorille de sûreté (a safe), François-Xavier Lalanne was convinced that sculpture, and art in general, can have a function. His style is driven by a spirit of synthesis, combining purity and rigor of form.

François-Xavier Lalanne studied painting at the Académie Julian before turning to sculpture in the early 1950s. His work has been shown at major exhibitions around the world, including the White Chapel in London in 1976, the Château de Chenonceau in 1991, the Château de Bagatelle in 1998, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2010, and more recently the Château de Versailles and the Clark Art Institute in the United States, in 2021.

1 - Flammarion, 2008