The Acquisition Award of the SOLO Collection at the ARCOmadrid 2023 has been awarded to the work ‘The liberation of the myth (2022)’ by the Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, her work has been exhibited at the Galería Senda stand (9B21). This piece will be included in the upcoming Espacio SOLO exhibition titled “Protection No Longer Assured“, which will take place from March 10 and will explore different notions of the sublime.
The award was given by Pablo Martínez, CEO of the SOLO Collection, and Óscar Hormigos, its Chief Creative Officer, as well as Maribel López.
From left to right: Maribel López, Pablo Martínez, Óscar Hormigos and Carlos Durán.
Congratulations to the artist! We also want to express our gratitude both to the SOLO Collection for its commitment and support for contemporary art, and to the #ARCOmadrid fair for offering such an important platform for the art world.
SANDRA VÁSQUEZ DE LA HORRA, The Liberation Of The Myth 2022
This was already announced by Richard Wagner when he coined the term “Gesamtkunstwerk”, referring to opera as a total work of art that integrates the six arts: painting, sculpture, music, poetry, dance and architecture.
The Wagnerian ideal seeks a fusion between all the participatory elements of opera, as Jaume Plensa, known for his multifaceted artistic vision, has done. The Catalan artist has taken on the challenge of directing the stage production of the opera Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.
Verdi’s well-known opera premieres this February 16 under the direction of Josep Pons, with a powerful aesthetic and ritual presence of Jaume Plensa. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the artist confesses that “it is one of the most profound and interesting reflections on duality between body and soul, between abstraction and matter“.
Plensa affirms that “it is one of Shakespeare’s most mental plays, because we have all been Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and other characters in the play at one time or another“, which is addressed “to the deepest sense of the human being“. All in all, for Plensa, Macbeth represents a deeply introspective theatrical work that resonates with the universal human experience. He explains that each character in the play is a representation of diverse aspects of the human being, inviting the viewer to explore his or her own psyche through the operatic narrative.
“I wanted to make a completely mental opera, to see in each scene moments that are like us, we have all been characters in the piece at one time or another“. Through the costumes, with most costumes out of his time, working on the choreography with Antonio Ruiz and lighting with Urs Schönebaum, Jaume Plensa aims to bring the viewer a more spiritual vision of the work, capturing in the best possible way the journey through the imaginary characteristic of the sculptor. His goal is to take the viewer on a spiritual journey through the rich imaginary that characterizes his work as a sculptor.
Elena del Rivero has generated new music sheets, compositions constituted in and from the fragment, a palimpsest of memories that create community and collective imagination. Each work is nourished by previous gestures and generates choreographies in which we can intervene from shared thought. All these works accompany each other and are constellations that make up her vital imagination.
In this stellar space other voices resonate, other internal and social movements. In this space that welcomes us today, intimate passages and collective revolts are presented in constant dialogue, all forging her visual writing. Images, words, sound, spaces, her universe flies over us and touches us.
Without this necessary friction, the movement that fosters conduction would not take place, which, in the composer’s words, becomes a universal vocabulary in which music becomes language, made up of gestures and cadences, of fragments and memories of a collective ritual.
Some of the fragments that make up these collages were part of other works that were on the floor of his old studio, located on Cedar Street in New York, the day the attack took place of the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001.
We could imagine that, months later, after collecting the fragments, Butch Morris was being heard in some room in the city. Tunes that coexist and promote frequencies from almost forgotten remnants. It is interesting to point to that gesture before and after something, it is interesting to think together about that universal conduction.
It is convenient to attend to the generated landscapes, to the ritual that surrounds them and allows us to be united, with that pairing of images, rhythms and stories, with that simultaneity that promotes the performativity of the ritual.
Comprising nearly a hundred works, the exhibition covers Jaume Plensa’s production from 1990 to the present and has as a common thread the influence of literature and literature in his artistic production.
This morning, the Fundación Bancaja presented the exhibition “Jaume Plensa. Poetry of silence“, one of the largest retrospectives to date of one of the most renowned sculptors in international contemporary art. The exhibition reviews the artistic production of Jaume Plensa during four decades with the original influence of literature and letters in his work as a common thread, being the first retrospective to be developed from the prism of this creative universe that has been a constant throughout his career. The presentation was attended by Jaume Plensa; the president of the Fundación Bancaja, Rafael Alcón; and the curator of the exhibition, Javier Molins.
Installation shot, Poetry of Silence
Installation shot, Poetry of Silence
The exhibition is made up of about a hundred pieces dating from 1990 to the present, based on his sculptural work but also including works on paper. The exhibition tour reveals to the public some unpublished sculptures created by Plensa during the COVID-19 confinement, which are presented for the first time. The pieces presented include the iconic sculpture “Together” (2014), which was exhibited in 2015 at the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore during the Venice Biennale and has not been exhibited since.
The artist Jaume Plensa for TV3
Literature has always been a source of inspiration for Jaume Plensa. T.S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe or Vicent Andrés Estellés are some of the writers who have accompanied him throughout his life and have served as inspiration for countless works. This literary influence also extends to the letter itself as an element with which he composes his sculptures.
The exhibition shows how Plensa has used letters in many different ways, whether on curtains, gongs or the human body, perhaps his best-known works. This intersection of language with the human body is one of the bases of Plensa‘s work. As the artist explains, “a letter seems nothing, it is something humble, but together with others they form words, and words form texts and texts form thought“.
The sculptor began with the Latin alphabet and gradually incorporated other alphabets, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Cyrillic, Korean, Hindi, etc. For Plensa, each letter has a unique beauty, but all of them together are a sample of the diversity of the world and the coexistence of different cultures.
From left to right: Javier Molins, Carlos Durán, Jaume Plensa and Laura Medina
The retrospective includes both large and medium-sized works as well as Plensa‘s more intimate small-format works. Along with the presence of literature as a source of inspiration, the exhibition includes other constant themes in his career such as silence, dreams and desire, music and family.
The exhibition “Jaume Plensa. Poetry of silence” can be visited at the headquarters of the Fundación Bancaja in Valencia (Plaza Tetuán, 23) from November 25, 2022 to March 19, 2023.
