Sheep of Animal-Obsessed Artist Flock to NYC

“Everyone can recognize animals throughout the world,” he’s quoted as saying in his New York Times obituary. “You don’t have to explain what they are or mean.”

Before his death in 2008, Lalanne merged usable objects with forms from the animal kingdom. In 1964, he sculpted a rhinoceros whose side opened into a writing desk. Over the following decades, he built a zoo of surreal animal objects: a cow with its side cut out to frame a park fountain, a fly you could use as a toilet, a head of cabbage with chicken legs, and most famously, a set of sheep executed in bronze and epoxy stone.

Now 24 of those sheep have made it to New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where they graze at a gas station-turned-pasture for the pleasure of the public.

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The installation — simply called “Sheep Station” — is first of many exhibitions that real estate developer and art collector Michael Shvo has planned for the old gas station in collaboration with the Paul Kasmin Gallery. Eventually, Shvo plans to turn the old gas station into a “premier collection of luxury residences,” but until then art will populate the old Getty Station.

We at Modern Farmer are glad that a bit of the pastoral landscape has made it to the heart of Manhattan. If you want to see Lalanne’s sheep among the station pumps, the exhibit stays open until October 20th.