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Cécile RaynalChoir of beasts by Cécile Raynal - Animal smoke-fired stoneware sculptures2025
2025
$117,147.41
£86,756.68
€98,300
CA$161,395.74
A$179,444.06
CHF 94,488.17
MX$2,177,196.33
NOK 1,196,266.60
SEK 1,118,217.72
DKK 748,243
About the Item
Choir of beasts (Chœur de bêtes) is an installation by the contemporary French artist Cécile Raynal. The approximate dimensions refer to the sculptures as installed, as shown in the photographs. Each sculpture is between 75 and 84 cm high (29.5 – 33 in). There are four wooden bases (around 35 cm high (13.7 in), two of which are for the animals and two of which are empty for visitors. Each sculpture can be purchased individually. The fox is no longer available and would be replaced by another sculpture.
This installation, featuring eleven animals gathered around a cephalophorous figure, could evoke a witches’ Sabbath, Saint Francis preaching to the birds, Orpheus charming the animals… or any number of other interpretations, depending on the viewer’s perspective. The animals, all of a similar size, break the natural scale and adopt sometimes unreal postures, accentuating the enigmatic nature of the scene.
Describing her work, the artist writes:
“Hybrid beasts and creatures, peoples, mass culture: wolf, hare, fox, raccoon, goat, donkey, crow, feline, badger, world-tree, birder. So many motifs, subjects, metaphorical presences. […] They embody other spirits, other imaginations, other ways of seeing, moving and being moved. The peoples of the beasts suffer us, deplore us; always and everywhere, we fabulate them. They represent us, they duplicate us. […] So I model great silences between man and beast, envisaging possible alliances. The future is only possible in an alliance, a common field, an earthy and spiritual heart.”
Raynal has been developing Chœur de bêtes over several years, and it was recently featured in her solo exhibition À la table des Dames (At the Ladies’ Table) at Montivilliers Abbey in Normandy (2025). This historic site—long a place of life for women, nuns, and abbesses—served as the backdrop for a body of work that weaves together female portraits and animal figures. Raynal’s sculptures do not aim to charm; they are raw, sometimes unsettling, bearing the visible traces of their emergence from clay, from struggle. And yet, they stand—upright, animated. Her work evokes a world where the animal, the feminine, the instinctual, and the defiant are embraced as vital forces.
Cécile Raynal’s practice moves between her studio in Normandy and artist residencies on the margins of society—in prisons, hospitals, convents—where she creates clay portraits based on encounters with people she meets. Back in the studio, she deepens this approach, drawing from myths, fables, and literature to create hybrid beings—half-human, half-animal. Through these animal figures, Raynal invites viewers to reflect on a shared language between humans and beasts, a field of interaction where empathy, transformation, and alliance become possible.
- Creator:Cécile Raynal (1966, French)
- Creation Year:2025
- Dimensions:Height: 45.28 in (115 cm)Width: 275.6 in (700 cm)Depth: 275.6 in (700 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Paris, FR
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU803116764232
Cécile Raynal
Whether human or animal, Cécile Raynal’s figures are a way to explore the world. The artist travels to remote, forgotten or marginal places immortalising in clay life stories that she brings back to her studio. Her work has been exhibited in prestigious museums such as the Musée des Arts et Métiers (Paris, 2018) and is the subject of ambitious public commissions such as the bronze sculpture of Winston Churchill in Cap-d’Ail (France). “The result of chance or sought-after encounters, my work starts with the sculpted portrait, a totemic record of each of these confrontations, and builds itself on the complicity, the exchanges and the correspondence resulting from them.”
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