HONG KONG.- Ben Brown Fine Arts opened Les Lalanne: A Living Landscape, a spectacular exhibition of works by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, presented at the Hong Kong gallery in conjunction with Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. Bringing together an exceptional group of highly sought-after masterpieces, this blockbuster presentation marks one of the most significant showcases of Les Lalanne ever staged in Asia.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Ben Brown Fine Arts also announced the expansion of its Hong Kong gallery, significantly increasing its footprint to create a larger, more versatile exhibition space, including additional viewing rooms, accommodating increasingly ambitious, museum-quality presentations. The expansion underscores the gallery’s sustained commitment to Hong Kong and the wider Asian market, strengthening its role as a trusted platform for international artists and estates, while creating new opportunities for collaboration with collectors and institutions.
Les Lalanne: A Living Landscape inaugurates this new chapter. For the exhibition, the gallery is transformed into an imagined garden inspired by the serene poetry and spatial harmony of the Japanese Zen garden. Visitors step into a contemplative landscape where François-Xavier’s monumental animals pause mid-graze, and Claude’s botanical forms unfurl and coil, weaving an organic rhythm through the gallery. The result is immersive and theatrical, yet refined, a living landscape shaped by two of the twentieth century’s most original artistic voices.
At the heart of the exhibition are two of François-Xavier Lalanne’s celebrated Hippopotame Bar (1976), presented alongside Sauterelle Bar (1970). This marks the first time these landmark works have been shown together in Asia. In December 2025, a Hippopotame Bar achieved a record-breaking $31.4 million at Sotheby’s New York, cementing its place among the most celebrated sculptures of the twentieth century. These works reveal Lalanne’s rare ability to elevate the everyday into objects that are both irreverent and commanding.
These extraordinary bars are presented alongside François-Xavier’s iconic flock of Moutons, in what is the largest public presentation of the series ever staged in Hong Kong. Sited across the gallery in a gesture of quiet transhumance, the sheep seem momentarily at rest, as if the flock has briefly settled to graze within the imagined terrain. First conceived in 1965 with Moutons de Laine, the series evolved over decades to include epoxy stone and bronze editions. The exhibition brings together key examples from Les Nouveaux Moutons, including Bélier (1994), Brebis (1994), Agneau (1996) and Le Mouton Transhumant (1988), alongside works from the earlier Mouton de Pierre series (1979–1984). Humorous and quietly radical, the Moutons dissolve the boundary between sculpture and furniture. They invite touch and interaction, embodying Lalanne’s ambition to integrate art into everyday life.
In dialogue with François-Xavier’s animals are Claude’s lyrical explorations of the botanical world. Her celebrated Entrelacs and Ginkgo furniture, flora-adorned Miroirs, electroplated Candelabra and enchanting Choupatte and Pomme sculptures soften the landscape with their sinuous forms and fine detail. Foliage drifts across surfaces in intricate tracery, vines weaving and winding through the space. Branches arc and curl into functional forms, as though they blossomed into being. Informed by close observation of nature, shaped by Art Nouveau and animated by Surrealist wit, Claude’s practice transforms plants into objects of delicate enchantment.
The spirit of A Living Landscape is rooted in the Lalannes’ home in Ury, France. Their house and garden functioned as a living laboratory where art, animals, family life and craftsmanship existed side by side. The boundary between work and life dissolved. Gardens, especially for Claude, were places of careful balance, cultivated yet free, composed yet alive. That same sense of controlled wildness shapes this exhibition.
Like a Zen garden that distills the natural world into a contained microcosm, the Lalannes distilled nature into objects. Experienced collectively, A Living Landscape transforms the Hong Kong gallery into an immersive environment where sculptural flora and fauna exist in poetic balance, where fantasy and reality converge, and where viewers are invited not simply to observe, but to inhabit this world, and to experience sculpture as something both intimate and alive.
