From June 14 to November 2, 2025, the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc presents its new group exhibition Animal !? A showcase of masterpieces, curated by Christian Alandete.
"Popular references to animal figures are everywhere. They feature prominently in our everyday language, always in a dynamic interplay of comparison, identification, or distinction between humans and animals. They speak of them and of us, of them through us, and of us through them. But who is mimicking whom — humans or animals? That is the very question at the heart of this remarkable investigation unfolding this summer at the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, through the exhibition!"
— Michel-Édouard Leclerc
Conceived by curator Christian Alandete, the thematic group exhibition Animal !? offers a cross-disciplinary and transhistorical exploration of the animal's presence in art. Probably one of the earliest subjects in art history, the animal has appeared since the dawn of rock art and continues across the centuries with equal significance.
Animal painting was once a hallmark of academic art. At the turn of the 20th century, the animal representation became a vehicle for successive avant-garde movements. Other artists explored them as subjects that could revolutionize aesthetic experience—like the Surrealists, who turned to hybrid species and specimens from the animal kingdom previously relegated to the realm of the monstrous. Through these new objects of observation, we also see the emergence of a more humanist society, one driven by a complete reassessment of the place of humans and animals within the living world.
The study of animality through the centuries has contributed to the hierarchization, cataloging, and distinction of the human from the animal, and among humans, to the identification of the less-than-human, by attributing to them animal characteristics. From physiognomy and its racist derivations, to mimicry and anthropomorphism, artists have, through their works, offered new ways of seeing the other of the human, and of pointing, beyond differences, to what brings us together.
