The strongest sculpture often works by absence — by showing you the shape of something that is no longer there.
Goodbye Horses was an installation created by the Swiss artist Sandrine Pelletier and exhibited 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 Once the tar and latex had hardened, the wire-form skeleton was withdrawn, leaving nothing but empty black skeletal shells to haunt the room in menacing three dimensions.
Materials behaving badly
Pelletier challenges our preconceptions of what materials are for. Latex and wool are not commonly imagined as structural elements, yet here they become the exo-skeleton of an animal. The horse has always carried a double mythology — a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal — and Pelletier gives those associations a body. Her horses seem caught in the act of simultaneous formation and dissolution, stuck in an ethereal limbo, neither fully present nor fully gone.
The afterlife of an image, 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 whole point. In a culture that captures and freezes everything, an artwork designed to look like it is dissolving in front of you — that refuses to settle into a single stable picture — feels quietly defiant. The horses say goodbye, and keep saying it.