Silence

A new doctorate for Jaume Plensa

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Currently, in the art world, one of the names that resonates most is that of the famous artist Jaume Plensa. After a long career full of successes in various artistic fields, Plensa has become an example of a multidisciplinary artist, having left his personal mark in many of the existing artistic disciplines. From his enormous sculptural productions to his symbolic paintings, and even the arduous task of setting the stage for an opera at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, we can see that Jaume Plensa has dared all kinds of artistic adventures that have made him the international artist that we all know.

His artistic narrative

His work made an impact on the other side of the pond thanks to his interactive video sculpture «Crown Fountain», located in Chicago’s Millennium Park. This production managed to catapult his international fame, a clear example being the large number of Plensa‘s works housed in institutions and countries around the world such as «Endless» at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art (USA), «Wonderland» in Calgary (Canada) or «Nomade» in Antibes (France). His sculptures and public art installations, for which he is mostly known, always invite to silent contemplation, to connect with spirituality, with the body and with the collective memory. His pieces incite deep reflection and establish a necessary dialogue between the individual and his critical spirit, in order to make visible social issues such as the violation of human rights, oppression, inequalities or injustices.

To convey all this narrative based on awareness, a common point that connects all his projects is the monumentality that surrounds all his works. Not only when talking about their dimensions, but rather when trying to understand the reason for this grandeur that makes us feel part of the social struggle. His faces with closed eyes, his sculptures of pensive bodies or his installations composed with letters of various alphabets, are the proof of a humanity that must activate the five senses, meditate on the context that surrounds it and dissolve borders to unite in the same language: that of harmony and peace.

Prizes and awards

For all these reasons, it is not strange to think that Jaume Plensa has been awarded on several occasions, both for his artistic and social work. Here in Spain he has been awarded nothing more and nothing less than the Premi Nacional d’Arts Plàstiques de la Generalitat de Catalunya (1997), the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas de España (2012) or the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes del Ministerio de Cultura (2021), along with other personalities from the art world such as the actor Javier Bardem or the musical group Amaral. However, in this blog we want to celebrate and congratulate Jaume Plensa on receiving his fourth honorary degree, this time from the University of Notre-Dame (Indiana, USA). Other doctorates Plensa has been awarded by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2018) and the Universidad Internacional Méndez Pelayo (2022).

From Galeria SENDA we want to give a warm applause to this Catalan artist who has managed to break boundaries and expose an art designed to be shown to the world. So that his works continue to impact the lives of many people and urban scenarios in all countries of the world. So that the narratives of his projects and the impact they have on our society continue to be awarded.

«Poetry of silence», an exhibition by Jaume Plensa at the Fundación Bancaja in Valencia

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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.

Image of an exhibition of paintings by Jaume Plensa
Installation shot, Poetry of Silence
Image of a sculpture by Jaume Plensa
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.

Image of journalists interviewing a man in front of a sculpture by Jaume Plensa

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“.

Image of an exhibition of Jaume Plensa
Image of an exhibition of Jaume Plensa

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.

Image of three men and a woman inside a sculpture by Jaume Plensa
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.

All the information here:

https://www.fundacionbancaja.es/exposicion/jaume-plensa-poesia-del-silencio/

Plensa and the faces of Ukraine

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The artist pays tribute to the victims of war in his new exhibition in the French town of Céret

“Every time a human being dies,/the house closes and a place is lost./My work is its memory; the frozen fixation/of so many bodies that are developing/and disappearing in the fleetingness of life./My work is its volume.” Jaume Plensa wrote this poem in 2000 and his verses, from which he has taken the title of his new exhibition, “Every face is a place“, resonate with a painful echo in each of the sculptures and drawings gathered at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Céret (France).

“In Ukraine there are many people dying, many houses destroyed, many places to which it will no longer be possible to return… How can art help in such tragic situations like this? I think these faces are a tribute to all the faces we are seeing in the press, those dramatic photographs of women and children going into exile, and of men who have decided to stay to defend their homeland, their country and their little place, their home, their work. We are so much alike that I find it scandalous that we call ourselves by different names or use different flags: we human beings are practically identical“.

Image of a woman in a Jaume Plensa exhibition

A visitor walks between the sculptures ‘Julia‘ and ‘Lou‘ | Agencia EFE

“Every face is a place” (until June 6) is Jaume Plensa‘s second exhibition in Céret after his successful presentation in 2015. This time he has returned to inaugurate the new stage of the Museo de la Catalunya Nord, which reopens after more than two years of works with its expanded collection and a new 1,300-meter pavilion designed by the prestigious architect Pierre-Louis Faloci. There, in this new wing “that flows as if it were a small river between the houses of Céret“, Plensa has put into conversation a dozen sculptures and twenty drawings whose absolute protagonist is the portrait. “The face,” he recalls, “is the part of our body that we cannot see, the great gift we give to others; the photograph of the soul, the door we open to others“.

“We human beings are so similar that it is a scandal that we use different flags”

Plensa wanted to open his tour with another of his obsessions, silence, to which he invites through Carlota, the same girl who, from her 24 meters high, inspires calm in an old dock in Newport (New Jersey), just in front of Manhattan. The one that now receives the visitor is much smaller and is built with Macael marble, but the attitude is the same, the index finger on the lips. “I invite silence, not to not speak, but just the opposite. To be able to listen and better understand our thoughts, the vibration of our body and our ideas“. He also has his eyes closed. “I like to think that the viewer can use the sculpture as a mirror, that he himself closes his eyes and tries to look at this wonderful inner landscape that we keep hidden for reasons of education or culture, because we always believe that there are other more important things to talk about than oneself, and it seems to me that this way we miss valuable information from so many and so many people“.

Image of a woman in a Jaume Plensa exhibition

Image of the exhibition “Every face is a place” by David Borrat | Agencia EFE

The ghost of war crosses the path again. “It’s a stupid war” Plensa laments. “I have many friends in Ukraine and also in Russia, I have exhibited in Kiev and I have exhibited in Moscow, and what is happening is an absolute misunderstanding. I hope it ends soon, and we return to civility, as Vicent Andrés Estellés used to say“. The artist also remembers Oscar Wilde, who said that “when you start to live you really want to write because what you are looking for is to understand life, and the more you have lived, the less you write because you realize that life is to be lived, not to be written“. The same thing happens to him. But, above all, a letter the poet wrote from Reading prison comes to mind, where he described the most serious problems they faced in prison: illness, hunger and insomnia. “That’s what must be happening in Ukraine” he imagines.

Image of Jaume Plensa surrounded by two of his sculptures.

Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa during the presentation to the press by David Borrat | Agencia EFE

The artist delves into the faces of others from a first self-portrait, himself seated inside a large sphere made of letters of different alphabets that protects him and at the same time unites him to the world. “Sculpture is like a language in a bottle” he reflects. And the message is very important, but the bottle is key. “And here there are many bottles with a very similar message“. An art that declines the same idea in different containers. Faces in cast stainless steel, in bronze on wood that was captured when he was still alive, on burnt trunks that give them an almost sacred air or reaching almost invisibility in transparent meshes, like the one he presented at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid. “Matter and invisibility seem contradictory terms, but there is a key moment in Macbeth that I think is a great definition of sculpture. Macbeth has just killed the king and realizes that he has not killed a being, a man, but he has killed the possibility of sleep. And that extraordinary idea that through matter you can speak of the invisible, of the untouchable, of what we cannot understand, is my sculpture“.

“The face is the part of our body we cannot see, the great gift we give to others”

Then come the spectators, who will complete the exhibition with their own faces and will join the ones that appear on the walls in the form of drawings. Some of them, the most recent ones, made on the sheets that protected the sculptures from dust in the studio and that by means of the frotage technique, with pastel and charcoal, absorb their traces as if they were a shroud. This will not be the only exhibition in which this year he will link sculptures and drawings. In May, he will be exhibiting at the Lelong Gallery in Paris and, in June, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (England) and at the Picasso Museum in Antibes (France).

Source: La Vanguardia. Saturday, March 5, 2022
https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20220305/8101511/plensa-rostros-ucrania.html