Three piglets were stolen from an art exhibition in Copenhagen over the weekend after a provocative artist said they would be allowed to starve to death in a commentary about animal welfare in Denmark, one of the world’s largest pork exporters.

The artist, Marco Evaristti, said in an interview on Monday that his exhibition, “And Now You Care?,” was meant to “wake up the Danish society” to the mistreatment of pigs, pointing to statistics that tens of thousands of pigs die each day because of poor conditions.

“I have some kind of voice as an artist to talk about the issue,” Evaristti, 62, said. “So I will share my thoughts about what I think about the treatment of the animals in Denmark.”

The exhibition, which opened on Friday inside a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen, included three live piglets that were caged by two shopping carts on a pile of straw. Large-scale paintings of the Danish flag and slaughtered pigs hung on the walls.

The pigs, which were given water but no food, were expected to live up to five days. Evaristti said he also would not eat or drink until the exhibition came to an end.

But the pigs did not die. They disappeared.

Evaristti, who was born in Chile, said that while the exhibition space was being cleaned on Saturday morning, members of an animal rights organization came to check on the piglets. Shortly after they left, the theft occurred.

“They closed the door while the cleaning people were cleaning the toilet,” he said, adding that the door was unlocked. “After four minutes, they come out and it was no pigs.”

A spokesman for the Copenhagen Police said that it was notified about the theft just before noon on Saturday and that nobody had been charged. Evaristti, who said he and his family had received numerous threats, does not expect the piglets to be returned.

Animal rights groups were divided over Evaristti’s latest exhibition, with some agreeing with his message but not his method and presentation. A review from a Danish newspaper slammed the exhibition as “old-fashioned avant-garde.”

Mathias Madsen, a campaign manager for Anima International Denmark, said in a statement that the organization had reported Evaristti to the police when he announced his plans to starve the piglets to death.

“This would violate multiple sections of the Danish Animal Welfare Act, and we wanted authorities prepared to intervene,” Madsen said, adding that the strong public reaction to the exhibition was a reminder that people find animal suffering unacceptable.

There are about 5,000 pig farms in Denmark that produce approximately 28 million pigs annually, according to the Danish Agriculture and Food Council. Many are slaughtered, with more than 70 percent of the pig meat exported to countries within the European Union.

Birgitte Damm, the chief consultant for farm animals and mink for Animal Protection Denmark, said about 25,000 piglets die each day in Danish stables, some from starvation, because the country’s sows are bred to birth 20 piglets but have only 14 teats.

“We completely understand the indignation, frustration and even anger over the continued abuse of millions of pigs in the Danish pig industry,” Damm said about Evaristti’s exhibition. “This has been going on for decades, and it is completely unacceptable. However, we cannot allow three individual piglets to suffer in order to make our point.”

Evaristti said his idea for the exhibition came from reading a newspaper article about the topic around October. “I knew that something was wrong in Denmark, but I didn’t know that it was so bad,” he said.

On Monday night, he faced a critical question: What now? He said that an exhibition without the piglets would be “boring” and “plastic,” before he shut it down altogether on Tuesday.

“If you take your heart from your body, you cannot exist, only as the body without soul,” he said. “My exhibition doesn’t have a soul anymore. It’s only a body and I’m not interested in representing a body. I want the soul with the body.”