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Cécile RaynalThe beasts (owl) by Cécile Raynal - Animal sculpture, figurative, smoke-fired2024
2024
$3,297.30
£2,464.24
€2,760
CA$4,548.79
A$4,982.34
CHF 2,623.20
MX$59,462.55
NOK 33,430.35
SEK 30,560.38
DKK 21,037.12
About the Item
The beasts (owl) is a unique smoke-fired stoneware sculpture by French contemporary artist Cécile Raynal, dimensions are 25 cm × 19 cm × 19 cm (9.8 × 7.5 × 7.5 in)
This work was conceived as part of Les bêtes (The Beasts), a sculptural installation bringing together twelve animals arranged around a cephalophorous figure. Uniform in scale, the animals disrupt natural proportions and adopt occasionally unreal or strained postures, reinforcing the enigmatic tension of the scene. Reflecting on the installation, the artist evokes a constellation of hybrid beings and symbolic presences drawn from myth, folklore and popular culture—wolf, hare, fox, raccoon, goat, donkey, crow, feline, badger, world-tree, birder.
These figures, she explains, embody other spirits and other modes of perception, movement and existence. They mirror humanity, duplicate it, and silently endure it. Through them, Raynal imagines moments of suspension between human and animal, opening the possibility of alliances—suggesting that the future can only emerge from a shared, earthly and spiritual ground.
Les bêtes was presented in Cécile Raynal’s solo exhibition À la table des Dames (At the Ladies’ Table) at Montivilliers Abbey in Normandy (2025).
Within this historic site—long inhabited by women, nuns and abbesses—the artist chose to install works that intertwine female figures and animal forms. Raynal’s sculptures do not seek to please; they can appear unsettling, even raw. Marked by their passage through matter and ordeal, they nevertheless stand upright and animated, asserting a powerful presence. They evoke a world in which the animal, feminine, instinctive and rebellious dimensions are embraced as vital forces. Set against the restored architecture of the Abbey, the exhibition retraced fifteen years of the French artist’s singular practice.
Cécile Raynal’s work unfolds between her studio in Normandy and residencies in sites at the margins of society—prisons, hospitals, convents. In these contexts, she produces clay portraits shaped by encounters and exchanges with the people she meets.
Back in the studio, this relational process expands through an extensive engagement with myths, tales and literary sources, giving rise to sculptures of animals and hybrid, half-human figures. Through these animal presences, Raynal invites viewers to perceive a shared language between human and beast, foregrounding their interdependence and continuous exchange.
- Creator:Cécile Raynal (1966, French)
- Creation Year:2024
- Dimensions:Height: 9.85 in (25 cm)Width: 7.49 in (19 cm)Depth: 7.49 in (19 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Paris, FR
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU803117380522
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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