Jean-Marie Appriou The Horses

Jean-Marie Appriou’s massive equine sculptures stand like surreal sentinels at the entrance to Central Park. The artist was inspired by the horses nearby who pull tourists in carriages through the City and by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gilded monument of William Tecumseh Sherman on horseback just opposite this site at Grand Army Plaza. However, Appriou’s sculptures poetically reimagine the species. The artist carved clay and foam models to cast in aluminum, emphasizing the tool marks and fingerprints of his tactile process. The works’ jagged textures and silvery surfaces create a dynamic play of light and shadow as we move around them, emphasizing the hallucinatory qualities of their composition and imbuing them with a dreamlike energy.

Appriou (b. 1986, Brest, France) has fashioned the forms of The Horses as fantastical beasts with hybrid characteristics and human qualities, placing them in a long tradition of mythological animal artworks. With their curious compositions and titles, these horses suggest: a daunting gateway formed by an armor-clad warrior (Le Guerrier/The Warrior), a forest of legs of entwined lovers (Les Amants au Bois/The Lovers in the Woods), and a sphinx-like mystic seated on its haunches and draped in an embellished cape (Le Joueur/The Player). They encourage us to make our own imaginative associations and to reconsider how civic sculpture addresses its public. Rather than an equestrian statue upon an elevated pedestal, these horses invite audiences through them, under them, and around them—bringing us closer to the formal dynamism and psychic mystery of these majestic creatures.

Jean-Marie Appriou: The Horses is curated by Public Art Fund Curator Daniel S. Palmer.