Art exhibition sheds light on the creativity of apes and elephants

It is a common complaint in the abstract art galleries up and down the country: “A monkey could have painted that,”. Well, now they have – apes, orangutans, gorillas and chimps, to be precise – and an elephant called Boon Mee from Thailand. In a world first, an exhibition featuring abstract paintings by a range of species has opened in University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology in Bloomsbury.



Visitors are being invited to question whether elephants “can be creative” and whether the paintings can be “dismissed as meaningless”. Jack Ashby, manager of the museum, said: “Whether this is actually art is the big question. While individual elephants are trained to always paint the same thing, art produced by apes is a lot more creative and is almost indistinguishable from abstract art by humans who use similar techniques.”

Co-curator Mike Tuck added: “It starts to raise very interesting questions about the nature of human art.” Salvador Dali famously once said: “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!”


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Co-curators Will and Mike Tuck, graduates of the Royal Academy of Art and UCL Slade School of Fine Art, are exhibiting works they have brought from zoos around the world. Will added: “We believe the exhibition at the Grant Museum to be the first to exhibit multiple species’ paintings and to attempt to take a broad view of the phenomenon.” The exhibition, Art by Animals, is on until March 9.