In The Mind’s Garden | Magritte & Les Lalanne - 8th October - 13th December 2025
Di Donna and Ben Brown Fine Arts presented Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden, a major exhibition at Di Donna’s Madison Avenue gallery. The exhibition brought together the visionary worlds of René Magritte, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne (known collectively as Les Lalanne) - artists who did not merely depict the natural world but reimagined it as a fertile landscape of poetic foresight and surreal transformation.
In the Mind’s Garden was the first exhibition to place Magritte and Les Lalanne in direct dialogue. Featuring over 50 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture drawn from important private collections, it invited viewers into a world where nature is not fixed but fluid - shaped 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’s 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—to draw forth new realities from the raw material of the world.
Magritte’s dreamlike compositions bend logic with surgical precision, unsettling the boundary between reality and illusion. In parallel, Les Lalanne reconceive nature through sculpture: François-Xavier’s fantastical animals double as functional objects, while Claude’s intricate botanical forms blur the line between plant, body, and artifice. Their works enchant and provoke, rendering nature both tactile and transcendent—fragments 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’ sustained support, their work came to inhabit a space where mystery, playfulness, and metamorphosis converge.
This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, produced for the occasion of the exhibition, contains texts from leading scholars in Surrealism with a focus on Magritte and Les Lalanne.
In The Mind’s Garden | Magritte & Les Lalanne - 8th October - 13th December 2025
Di Donna and Ben Brown Fine Arts presented Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden, a major exhibition at Di Donna’s Madison Avenue gallery. The exhibition brought together the visionary worlds of René Magritte, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne (known collectively as Les Lalanne) - artists who did not merely depict the natural world but reimagined it as a fertile landscape of poetic foresight and surreal transformation.
In the Mind’s Garden was the first exhibition to place Magritte and Les Lalanne in direct dialogue. Featuring over 50 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture drawn from important private collections, it invited viewers into a world where nature is not fixed but fluid - shaped 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’s 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—to draw forth new realities from the raw material of the world.
Magritte’s dreamlike compositions bend logic with surgical precision, unsettling the boundary between reality and illusion. In parallel, Les Lalanne reconceive nature through sculpture: François-Xavier’s fantastical animals double as functional objects, while Claude’s intricate botanical forms blur the line between plant, body, and artifice. Their works enchant and provoke, rendering nature both tactile and transcendent—fragments 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’ sustained support, their work came to inhabit a space where mystery, playfulness, and metamorphosis converge.
This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, produced for the occasion of the exhibition, contains texts from leading scholars in Surrealism with a focus on Magritte and Les Lalanne.
