Jaume Plensa

JAUME PLENSA (Barcelona, 1955).
Untitled.1984
Mixed media on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower margin.
Provenance: Ignacio Lassaletta gallery.
Measurements: 126 x 45 cm ; 147,5 x 66 cm (frame).

This work belongs to a particularly intense period in Jaume Plensa's career, prior to his international consolidation as a sculptor of large monumental heads. In the eighties, his work on paper is characterized by a strong material and symbolic charge, where the human figure appears fragmented, veiled or subjected to processes of transformation.

The composition presents a totemic and frontal figure, of marked verticality, constructed by superimpositions of pigment, gouaches and areas of strong chromatic density. The intense reds act as nuclei of emotional tension, while the white bands introduce a sense of censorship, silence or containment. The material flows and overflows in the margins, generating an almost organic effect.

Already at this date, central concerns in Plensa's work can be perceived: the body as a symbolic territory, veiled identity, the relationship between interiority and exteriority, and the presence of the spiritual in the human figure. The vertical monumentality of the format reinforces this totemic and archaic dimension, connecting with primitive and ritual imagery.

It is a representative piece of his experimental production of the eighties, a key stage to understand the artist's later evolution towards an increasingly refined language, but always focused on the human condition as the axis of his aesthetic research.

Trained at the Massana School in Barcelona and later influenced by contemporary European sculpture, Plensa develops his own style where the human figure, signs and materials are simplified and reorganized in compositions that dialogue with the viewer both visually and conceptually. Plensa has exhibited internationally at leading institutions such as the Venice Biennale, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the MoMA in New York and the MACBA in Barcelona. His sculptures and drawings are part of such prestigious collections as the Tate Modern (London), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).