Animals in Contemporary art are rarely just animals. From Banksy’s rats to Hirst’s shark and Koons’ balloon dogs, the greatest artists use the natural world to say what words cannot. From Pop Art to wildlife photography, this guide explores why seven of the greatest contemporary artists turn to animal symbolism in art, tracing what each animal means, why these artists chose it, and what that reveals about the ideas and obsessions that define our cultural moment today.
Walk through almost any major museum in the world and you’ll encounter animals at every turn, be it a lion guarding an Egyptian sarcophagus, a lamb resting at Christ’s feet or a monkey mimicking human folly in a Renaissance painting. Through the centuries, artists have returned to animals not simply because they are beautiful, powerful or familiar, but because they offer one of art’s oldest and most powerful symbolic languages.
The meaning of animal symbolism in art has never been fixed. Shaped by religion, mythology, literature and folklore, familiar creatures have come to represent everything from innocence and transformation to rebellion and mortality. Contemporary artists continue to reinvent those associations, with the same animal capable of telling an entirely different story depending on the artist’s vision.
The seven artists in this guide explore animal symbolism in strikingly different ways. From Damien Hirst’s mesmerising butterflies to Banksy’s rebellious rats, they demonstrate how animals in Contemporary art continue to give visual form to some of humanity’s biggest questions and concerns.
What Is Animal Symbolism in Art? A Brief History of Meaning and Metaphor
Long before artists captured kings, saints and self-portraits on their canvas, they painted animals. The oldest known figurative image of an animal, a warty pig discovered in Indonesia’s Leang Karampuang cave, dates back more than 45,000 years, while the prehistoric cave paintings at Chauvet in France depict lions, horses and rhinoceroses with astonishing naturalism. Significantly, many of these animals were not those relied upon most for food, suggesting they already carried associations with power, spirituality and humanity’s place within the natural world.
As civilisations developed, those symbolic associations became increasingly sophisticated. In Ancient Egypt, animals were closely linked to the divine: Horus, the falcon-headed god, represented kingship and protection, while Bastet, depicted as a cat, was emblematic of fertility and guardianship. The Greeks and Romans likewise linked animals to their gods, from Athena’s owl symbolising wisdom to Zeus’ eagle representing authority and power. Animals became a visual shorthand for qualities that were admired, feared or revered.
By the Middle Ages, these meanings had been gathered into richly illustrated bestiaries, giving artists a shared symbolic vocabulary that spread into manuscripts, church carvings and paintings. Renaissance artists inherited this visual language, weaving symbolic animals into portraits and religious scenes. A small dog signifies loyalty in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, while the bird in Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch foreshadows Christ’s crucifixion.
Throughout history, animal symbols in art have taken on different meanings depending on the culture, period or artist. Cats, for example, were revered in Ancient Egypt but later became associated with witchcraft in parts of Europe. Dragons symbolise prosperity and imperial power across much of East Asia, while Western traditions often cast them as destructive monsters. Even familiar animals in art history evolve over time as societies reinterpret the stories they tell about the natural world.
David Shrigley, Balance the Ball on Your Nose (2021)
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COLLECTOR INSIGHT: ANIMAL SYMBOLISM IN ART – TRADITIONAL MEANINGS AT A GLANCE Lamb – Innocence, gentleness, sacrifice and Christian devotion. Dog – Loyalty, fidelity, protection and companionship. Cat – Independence, mystery, protection and the supernatural. Bird – Freedom, spirituality and the connection between heaven and earth. Snake – Temptation, rebirth, transformation and healing. Peacock – Vanity, immortality, resurrection and beauty. Sparrow – Humility, hope and resilience. Dove – Peace, hope and the Holy Spirit. Horse – Strength, freedom, nobility and endurance. War Horse – Courage, loyalty and martial prowess. Wolf – Instinct, wilderness, survival and loyalty (or danger, depending on the culture). Lion – Power, courage, royalty and leadership. Bull – Strength, fertility, abundance and determination. Deer – Gentleness, purity, spirituality and renewal. Fish – Faith, abundance and Christianity. Butterfly – Transformation, rebirth and the soul. Owl – Wisdom, knowledge and mystery. Eagle – Power, freedom, vision and spiritual enlightenment. Fox – Cunning, intelligence and adaptability. Rabbit/Hare – Fertility, renewal, abundance and good fortune. |
Against this historical backdrop, Contemporary artists have found new ways to use animals as symbols in art, with some building on traditional associations and others overturning them entirely. The seven artists below show just how inventive that visual language has become.
7 Artists Who Use Animals in Contemporary Art as Vehicles for Big Ideas
The artists below use animals as a starting point for exploring themes beyond the natural world. Across installation, sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking and drawing, animals become symbols, protagonists or provocateurs, demonstrating the remarkable breadth of Contemporary animal art today.
Damien Hirst: Sharks, Butterflies and the Symbolism of Mortality
Damien Hirst, Butterfly (Fate) (2009)
Throughout his career, Damien Hirst has used art to investigate how we understand death, why we are drawn to beauty and what lies between science and belief. Animals have become one of his most recognisable ways of examining those themes, from the preserved shark that became one of the defining images of the Young British Artists movement to the butterflies that have flitted through his practice for more than three decades.
In 1991, the British artist shocked audiences with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – a 14-foot tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde. Equal parts scientific specimen and Contemporary sculpture, this iconic Damien Hirst shark forced viewers into an uncomfortable confrontation with death. Butterflies, meanwhile, offered a more seductive route into the same subject. More commonly associated with transformation, resurrection and the soul, they allowed Hirst to explore the concept of mortality through extraordinary beauty rather than fear.
First introduced in his 1991 installation In and Out of Love (1991), butterflies have become one of the most persistent motifs in Hirst’s career. They reappear in series including ‘The Souls on Jacob’s Ladder Take Their Flight’ and ‘Cathedral’ (both 2007), where kaleidoscopic arrangements evoke devotional icons and stained-glass windows. By reinterpreting one of art history’s oldest symbols, Hirst demonstrates how animals in Contemporary art can communicate profound truths about beauty, death and belief, with his butterfly creations among the most sought-after pieces in his market.
EXPLORE DAMIEN HIRST BUTTERFLY ART FOR SALE
Jeff Koons: Balloon Animals and the Art of Spectacle
Jeff Koons, Balloon Rabbit, Monkey and Swan (2017)
Unlike Damien Hirst, whose animals frequently confront viewers with their own mortality, Jeff Koons’ famous animal sculptures take their inspiration from forms associated with entertainment and childhood. Comprising dogs, rabbits, monkeys and swans, the Jeff Koons Balloon Animals series transforms familiar symbols of joy into oversized artworks that blur the boundaries between popular culture, luxury and fine art.
These inflatable forms carry a deeper symbolism for Koons. He has described them as a metaphor for human life itself: just as a balloon depends on breath to take shape, so too do we. By recreating these fragile party decorations in mirror-polished stainless steel, he transforms fleeting objects into permanent monuments to optimism, vulnerability and the shared experience of being alive.
This tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary helps explain the lasting appeal of the series, with his balloon animals – among the simplest objects of childhood – occupying the highest tier of the blue chip art market. In 2013, Balloon Dog (Orange) sold for US$58.4 million before Rabbit surpassed it in 2019 with a sale of US$91.1 million.
Koons has since revisited these forms in a range of smaller porcelain editions, including Balloon Rabbit, Balloon Monkey and Balloon Swan (2017). Measuring 27 centimetres high, they retain the mirror-like surfaces and playful silhouettes of their much larger counterparts, preserving the sense of joy and wonder that made the originals so iconic.
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Banksy: Rat Rebellion, Animals and the Symbolism of Street Art
Banksy, Gangsta Rat (Signed) (2004)
Throughout his career, Banksy has repeatedly turned to animals as shorthand for the people, institutions and behaviours he wants to challenge. Rats, dogs and chimpanzees become symbols of rebellion, power and political dysfunction, carrying messages that would lose their immediacy if delivered through human figures alone.
The Banksy rat is the foundation of the street artist’s visual language. Associated with vermin and urban decay, it represents his alter ego – intelligent, adaptable and able to survive where it is least wanted. In his 2005 book Wall and Piece, Banksy wrote: “Rats exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted… And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees.” Like the graffiti artist, the rat exists outside sanctioned spaces, is routinely erased and yet continues to reappear, making it a potent symbol of resistance, resilience and dissent.
Other Banksy animals serve equally deliberate purposes. In Choose Your Weapon (2009), Keith Haring’s barking dog carries two layers of meaning. It recalls Haring’s symbol of authority, aggression and the abuse of power, while echoing the “weapon dogs” owned by urban gangs, adding contemporary associations of intimidation and violence.
Devolved Parliament (2009), meanwhile, scales his animal symbolism up dramatically, replacing MPs in the House of Commons with chimpanzees. The substitution transforms Britain’s most recognisable political institution into a scene of tribal behaviour and barely controlled chaos, challenging the notion that those in power are any more rational than the animals they have become.
Andy Warhol: Endangered Species and the Politics of Pop Art Animals
Andy Warhol, Bald Eagle, from Endangered Species (1983)
By the early 1980s, Andy Warhol had spent two decades immortalising celebrities through his particular brand of Pop Art. Following conversations with art dealers and environmental activists Ronald and Frayda Feldman about the growing extinction crisis facing wildlife, he replaced movie stars with endangered animals. Whereas many artists inspired by animals sought realism, Warhol transformed endangered species into cultural symbols of environmental loss.
Warhol famously referred to the works as his “animals in makeup”, applying the same vivid colours, flattened forms and graphic compositions seen in his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Treated with the same glamour as Hollywood stars, his Pop Art animals posed an unsettling question: why do we celebrate cultural icons while allowing these extraordinary creatures to disappear?
This iconic series of Andy Warhol animals wraps ecological anxiety in the seductive visual language of Pop Art. Its dazzling colours celebrate the beauty of the African elephant, giant panda, San Francisco Silverspot butterfly and other threatened animals, while acknowledging their uncertain future. Long before environmental issues became part of everyday conversation, Warhol brought wildlife conservation into mainstream popular culture, helping make the Andy Warhol ‘Endangered Species’ portfolio one of the most collectible of his later career.
Yayoi Kusama: The Butterflies, Fish and Sea Creatures of Her Infinite World
Growing up among the fields and greenhouses of her family’s seed nursery in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama developed an intense relationship with the natural world from a young age. In her autobiography, Infinity Net, she recalls flowers and plants appearing to come alive and speak to her, experiences that later found expression in her art depicting butterflies, seahorses and other living creatures.
Distinct from the other artists in this article, Kusama’s animals are not metaphors to be decoded but part of her lifelong exploration of infinity, repetition and what she describes as “self-obliteration”. Her signature polka dots and intricate cellular patterns gradually dissolve the distinction between the creature and its surroundings, suggesting that every living thing forms part of a vast, interconnected whole. As Kusama herself has said: “Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.”
This philosophy can be seen in screenprints including Butterfly (1985), Seahorses (1989), Snail (1989) and Dawn (1989). Butterflies float across patterned backgrounds that pulse with energy and marine creatures dissolve into intricate networks of dots and mosaic-like forms, transforming familiar animals into part of an endless visual continuum.
Kusama’s vision is every bit as powerful today as it was in the 1980s. As interest in her practice has grown internationally, collectors have looked beyond her celebrated Pumpkins and Infinity Nets to embrace the imaginative screenprints in which animals become part of her endlessly repeated universe of pattern and colour.
David Yarrow's Animal Photography: Elephants, Wolves, Lions and the Powerful Stories They Tell
David Yarrow, A Walk in the Woods (2026)
Before David Yarrow photographs an animal, he and his team write down the words they associate with it. Strength, loyalty, intelligence, resilience – those qualities become the blueprint for the image that follows. Every photograph is conceived as a portrait of character, capturing what Yarrow believes is the animal’s essential nature.
This approach informs every stage of his creative process. In the David Yarrow bison photograph 25 Degrees Below, Yarrow wanted to convey the fortitude and resilience of this wild beast, so he travelled to Yellowstone National Park in the depths of winter, where he waited for the temperature to plunge. With ice enveloping the animal’s coat, the bison is transformed into an almost prehistoric figure, bringing to life the resilience he set out to capture.
Whether photographing an elephant on the plains of Kenya, a lion emerging from floodwater or a wolf perched on the roof of a snowbound vintage truck, Yarrow approaches each image as a carefully constructed narrative. Whereas works such as Africa (2018) and After the Flood (1995) derive their power from the commanding presence of a single animal, 1953 (2024) and A Street Car Named Desire (2018) unfold like scenes from an unwritten film.
Yarrow’s animal photography also demonstrates how Contemporary wildlife art can support conservation. An ambassador for organisations including Tusk, WildArk and the Kevin Richardson Foundation, he has raised millions for wildlife and humanitarian causes. That commitment is evident in Our Pride, created with Maddox Gallery for the Art for Heroes campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a lioness to symbolise courage, protection and resilience, the photograph paid tribute to NHS staff and showed how animal photography can capture universal human stories.
David Shrigley: Animals as Mirrors of Human Behaviour
David Shrigley, I Try To Be Friendly (2023)
David Shrigley strips away the traditional symbolism commonly associated with animals, transforming them instead into emblems of human experience. In his hands, animals become stand-ins for people, expressing awkwardness, affection, vanity, frustration and existential uncertainty with disarming honesty. Shrigley has often suggested that animals are more authentic than humans, making them ideal messengers for observations that might sound uncomfortable or cynical if spoken by a person.
Central to this approach is the relationship between image and text. Shrigley's deliberately crude drawings and handwritten captions don't explain one another; they create a subtle tension between what the viewer sees and what they read. It is within that gap that humour, poignancy and symbolism emerge.
That interplay is evident in many David Shrigley animals. In I Try To Be Friendly, a shark confesses, “I try to be friendly but I’m not very good at it”, transforming a creature associated with fear into a symbol of social anxiety and the gap between appearance and reality. Every Time I Think of Him I Am Happy uses an elephant to represent affection and emotional bonds, while Balance the Ball on Your Nose turns a performing seal into a symbol of resistance, rejecting the pointless expectations placed upon it.
Although deadpan humour is Shrigley’s signature, his animal prints rarely offer easy punchlines. While the other artists featured here use animals to symbolise mortality, political protest, environmental awareness or the living world, Shrigley turns to them to reveal the anxieties, contradictions and small absurdities that make us human.
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COLLECTOR INSIGHT: RECORD-BREAKING ANIMAL-THEMED ARTWORKS
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Beyond Decoration: What Collectors Should Look for in Contemporary Animal Artworks
Banksy, Choose Your Weapon - Magenta (Signed) (2010)
From prehistoric cave paintings to today’s leading Contemporary artists, animals have featured throughout art history because they carry meanings that transcend language. As this guide has shown, animal symbolism in art may encompass mortality and memory, political protest and conservation, humour and the complexities of human behaviour. The strongest examples are never simply representations of nature, but reflections of ourselves.
This distinction is important for collectors. A beautifully executed depiction of an animal may be visually appealing, but the most significant pieces often reveal something beyond their subject matter. Understanding the artist’s intention, the symbolism behind the animal and the context in which the work was created can explain why one piece continues to resonate after the first impression has faded.
Practical considerations are important too. Provenance, exhibition history, condition and scarcity all influence desirability, particularly for editions, prints and photographs. As editions sell through, limited edition art with animals often becomes more sought after, especially when supported by strong institutional recognition and sustained collector demand.
Ultimately, the most memorable examples of animal symbolism in art invite us to look beyond the creature. A shark can become a meditation on mortality, a chimpanzee a critique of political power, a butterfly a reminder of the interconnectedness of nature and a lioness a symbol of resilience. Few other artistic motifs are able to convey so much meaning with the same immediacy, which is why animal symbolism has endured for thousands of years.
EXPLORE ANIMALS IN CONTEMPORARY ART AT MADDOX GALLERY
From Jeff Koons' iconic balloon animals to David Yarrow's cinematic wildlife photography, contemporary artists continue to find powerful new ways of using animals to tell stories about the world around us. At Maddox Gallery, our specialists work with established and emerging artists exploring symbolism, storytelling and humanity’s relationship with nature.
If you’re looking to begin a collection or acquire an important piece by one of today’s leading Contemporary artists, our team can provide expert guidance on available artworks, market trends and collecting opportunities.
Explore our curated collection of animal art or speak to one of our Maddox Art Advisory specialists to discuss the market and find the right piece for your collection.