Bjorn Skaarup: Carnival of the Animals

For the offbeat cast of animals in his menagerie of bronze sculptures, Bjørn Skaarup draws from a diverse set of sources: classical mythology, ancient fables, modern animation, late Renaissance art, and 20th-century American popular culture. Cavalier Galleries in Connecticut recently exhibited “Carnival of the Animals,” a veritable zoo of these wild sculptures...

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Visitors to Bruce Museum in Greenwich will see animals as they’ve never seen them before in a recently opened exhibition by Bjorn Okholm Skaarup...

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Instantly recognizable — and yet somehow unfamiliar — the sculptures in Bjørn Okholm Skaarup’s “Carnival of the Animals” series may cause confusion. Is that rhino an Old Master? Is this bear a Lalannes? That reaction is exactly what the Danish-by-birth (and “uncompromising Italophile”) sculptor is going for. “I’ve always imagined my works to be some sort of imaginary collaboration between the old Cellini and a young Disney,” he says. “You know, the old stuff from the ’30s and ’40s, before it became this big old evil corporation that we know today.” To date, his whimsical, anthropomorphized bronze animals — “inspired by Italian classical bronze masters and by American Pop-art culture,” as the artist frames it — have mostly lined the promenades of Europe’s finest estates and museums. That changes this weekend, as Skaarup’s first-ever American museum retrospective opens at the Bruce Museum, the picturesque private-home institution in Greenwich, Conn...

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“Carnival of the Animals,” Danish sculptor Bjørn Okholm Skaarup’s first American museum exhibition, opens at the Bruce Museum on Oct. 31. The sculpture exhibition presents a contemporary bestiary — or classical book of animals — in bronze.

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