“Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden,” which opened this week at Di Donna Galleries in New York’s Upper East Side, pairs the Belgian Surrealist with the husband-and-wife duo Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. Both shared an affinity for reimagining nature as a poetic, dreamlike force. Rather than simply depicting the natural world, Magritte and the Lalannes revealed in it the mysterious and the uncanny—sometimes lighthearted, sometimes heady. They also reveled in breaking down its laws.
“There’s a strong interest in nature and also metamorphosis,” said Emmanuel Di Donna, motioning to an iconic Claude Lalanne —“if you look at the cabbage with chicken feet. It’s morphing into a fantastical object.”
Installation view of Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden at Di Donna Galleries. Photographer: Pauline Shapiro. René Magritte: © 2025 C. Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
“In the Mind’s Garden” unites Di Donna and Ben Brown, who first met when they both worked at Sotheby’s before setting up their own galleries. The London-based Ben Brown Fine Arts is closely associated with landmark Lalanne exhibitions, like the massive and spectacular “Planète Lalanne” in Venice. “I thought, what do I do next?” Brown said. “I thought I’d lie low for two years and then this came up. It was perfect because it’s much more intimate.”
Di Donna focused on Magritte and Brown on the Lalannes, then they’d meet in the middle. “It has come out as perfectly as we would have wanted,” Brown said. “The juxtaposition has been incredibly successful.”
Altogether, the show gathers more than 70 works, most drawn from private collections. Yes, some of the iconic Lalanne sheep flock appear, too. The show also revives the artists’ historical link to Alexander Iolas, the Greek-American dealer who represented both Magritte and the Lalannes. Sotheby’s later described Iolas as the man who “transformed René Magritte from a Belgian oddity to a worldwide celebrity.” Claude Lalanne put it more simply: “Our success was really entirely thanks to Iolas.”
The day before the opening, I toured the show with its curators. The exhibition sets two distinct visions of the surreal side by side—sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging, always in dialogue. Here are some standout works, with commentary from the dealers.
Claude Lalanne, (1974)
Claude Lalanne, (1974). On loan. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Pauline Shapiro Photography. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
The enigmatic dealer is depicted solemnly with his head framed by a jaw-like vise.
Di Donna: “He was the connective tissue” said Di Donna, “he represented all three: the Lalannes and Magritte. He was incredibly active, a Greek dealer who introduced Surrealism not just in America but also in Paris and London.”
Brown: “He died in the mid-’80s. He had galleries in Athens, Milan, Paris, New York. He worked with de Kooning, with Warhol—famously the ‘Last Supper.’ He also represented Ed Ruscha… Iolas was really the instigator of quite a lot of things in those days.”
“He put together a lot of great collections for people like the de Menils, the Agnellis, and the Rothschilds, which is why all of those collections have both Magritte and Lalanne in them, because these were stable artists. He was also a very difficult human being—complex, exuberant, intelligent, and very good at enticing wealthy collectors into his orbit.”
François-Xavier Lalanne, 1968/98
François-Xavier Lalanne, Hippopotame I (1968/98). © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Pauline Shapiro Photography. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
Combining beauty with functionality, is a marvelous life-size representation of a hippopotamus that also functions as a bath, complete with a sink.
Installation view of Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden at Di Donna Galleries. Photographer: Pauline Shapiro. René Magritte: © 2025 C. Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
Brown: “This is quite iconic. There are three of these, all different. One is in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. One was a commission from Marcel Duchamp’s wife ‘Teeny.’ This one I bought about seven years ago. It’s a fully functioning bath. The plumbing runs through the leg. You can hook it up, and it works.”
René Magritte, (1938–39)
René Magritte, Le Miroir Universel (1938–39). On loan. © 2025 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Pauline Shapiro Photography. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
belongs to Magritte’s series. It depicts a nude figure leaning against a rock as her body metamorphoses from flesh into the cerulean blue sky, a seamless fusion of the intimate and the infinite. At auction, it last appeared at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in October 2023, where it sold for HKD 77,575,000 ($ 9.9 million).
Di Donna: “The idea of this woman morphing into the landscape—it’s like inside and outside, which we’ve played with here in the theme of the exhibition. She’s becoming part of the landscape. It’s very poetic. She’s becoming very sculptural, with those eyes that have no pupils. She’s steady, ingrained in the landscape. The subject is his wife, Georgette. Here she’s both intimate and concealed, which speaks to themes of identity and concealment that run throughout his work.”
René Magritte, (ca. 1941)
René Magritte, Moralité du Sommeil (ca. 1941). © 2025 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Pauline Shapiro Photography. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
The show also highlights Magritte’s paintings that extend the exhibition’s themes of interior and exterior, private and public, dream and waking life.
Di Donna: “ embodies two of the major themes of the exhibition—the interplay between outdoors and indoors, and the desires of the unconscious mind. The anonymous central figure is imprisoned within the darkness of her own subconscious, while the brighter, less threatening ‘real’ world lies just beyond, suggested by gentle rolling hills. This is a striking example of Magritte’s manipulation of light and shadow, compelling the viewer’s gaze to bounce between interior and exterior realms, revealing the unconscious as an active, inescapable force shaping perception.”
Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne,
Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, Pomme de Ben (2007). On loan. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Pauline Shapiro Photography. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne were intertwined and showed their work together, but they had two distinct practices and rarely combined their talents.
Di Donna: “The apple is a typical form of Claude and obviously, the monkey, is a François-Xavier animal, which he did many times. But they decided to put it together.”
Brown: “Originally, there was an invitation card to my first exhibition when they did a photo montage of two sculptures joined—the monkey on the stem of the apple. I had to explain to everybody that the they were separate sculptures. Four or five months later they said, ‘Come on, we’ve got a sculpture for you. It’s called Voila.
René Magritte, (1964)
René Magritte, Le Chœur des Sphinges (1964). © 2025 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Pauline Shapiro Photography. Courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York.
Di Donna: “Deceptively simple upon first glance, this painting quickly reveals a subtle strangeness that challenges perception. A vast green forest is topped by a clear blue sky, dotted with mysterious forms seemingly extracted from the canopy of leaves below. Among these suspended shapes is a suggested pipe—one of the most emblematic motifs of Magritte’s visual language.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com