“In Chana Orloff’s sculptural œuvre, more than sixty sculptures depict animals. Two ostriches, a goat, a monkey, a squirrel, a horse, a few dogs, but above all fish and numerous birds (…) 

Yet, as the fish and birds in particular reveal, Chana Orloff reinvents these animals, retaining wings or fins while exploring forms that do not exist in nature. It is, rather, a personal exploration that leads her towards increasingly abstract forms, as in L’Oiseau rare humorously named, animals that do not walk, but also the shark-fish, the walking bird, and so on.

Yet while Chana Orloff reimagines the animal in her own way, her work is also grounded in close observation. She spends hours at the zoo, then returns to her studio and draws dozens of sketches from memory, just as she did with human models when she attended the Russian Academy. Humour is as present in her animal portraits as it is in her human ones, and sometimes the two overlap. To a journalist friend who had interviewed her at length, she gave a small plaster bird, The Bird with a Ruff. « But with its pointed beak (nose), tucked-in neck, skinny legs, ruff around its neck and attentive stance… it looks like me! ,” she exclaimed naïvely.”