The strongest sculpture often works by absence — by showing you the shape of something that is no longer there. Sandrine Pelletier's Goodbye Horses is a master class in exactly that.
How the horses were made
The installation, by the Swiss artist Sandrine Pelletier, was shown at Galerie Rosa Turetsky in 2009. To conjure her ghostly, floating ponies, Pelletier coated woollen strands in molten latex and tar and spread — or wove — them sparsely over a pre-moulded figure of a horse. Once the tar and latex had hardened into a brittle skin, the wire-form skeleton beneath was withdrawn, leaving nothing but empty black skeletal shells to haunt the room in menacing three dimensions. The technique is its own quiet drama: the structure that gave each horse its shape is the very thing removed, so that what remains is a husk holding the memory of a body.
Materials behaving badly
Part of the work's unease comes from its disobedient materials. Latex and wool are soft, domestic, associated with comfort and craft; we do not imagine them as load-bearing or structural. Pelletier makes them the exo-skeleton of an animal, and in doing so unsettles our basic assumptions about what a material is for. This material mischief is a thread through her wider practice, which moves between glass, ceramic, hair, wood and metal, always testing the point at which a substance turns against its own nature — the fragile made sharp, the soft made skeletal.
The horse, between destruction and rebirth
The animal she chose carries its own freight. The horse has always held a double mythology — a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal, war and harvest, death and deliverance. Pelletier gives those contradictions a body, then hollows it out. Her horses appear caught in the act of simultaneous formation and dissolution, stuck in an ethereal limbo, neither fully arriving nor fully gone. They read less like sculptures of horses than like the ghosts of them — the negative space where an animal used to be.
Reading it again in 2026
More than fifteen years after it was first shown, Goodbye Horses reads as a study in the thing every image now struggles against: permanence. Pelletier built creatures that were always in the process of vanishing and made that vanishing the entire point. In a culture that captures, freezes and endlessly reproduces everything, an artwork engineered to look as though it is dissolving in front of you — that refuses to settle into a single stable picture — feels quietly defiant. It belongs with the other works in our archive that find power in disappearance, from Bugo's vanishing street pieces to the dust-bodies of Olivier Valsecchi. The horses say goodbye, and keep saying it.