This print shows the kangaroos in their new enclosure in the zoo at Vincennes, with its dramatic artificial mountains in the background.
Most of Balkanyi’s studies of animals focus on character, and the etchings that she made from them tend to have quite simple compositions.
But here she places us in a zoo with bison in the middle distance and monkeys and a goat further off. But the focus is on the kangaroos.
If in our imagination we characterise kangaroos as dynamic creatures, jumping, running and boxing, here in their enclosure their behaviour is different: they sit immobile, watching the world go by.
What Balkanyi seems to have done is to transfer the potential dynamism of the animals into the structure of the picture. The composition is all triangles, pyramids and diagonals, dark on light. The result is an image that makes a subtle comment on the nature of zoos and their inmates.
