PARIS.- Great sculptors are often also great draughtsmen. In general, they are not keen on colour. For Plensa, drawing is a constant practice, a resource. In the spring of 2023, Jaume Plensa designed the staging, costumes and sets for Verdi's Macbeth for the Liceu, Barcelona's opera house. The first drawings in this exhibition come from this project. The (sometimes illegible) text that the artist incorporates into his collage drawings comes from Shakespeare's play. One series of small portraits is entitled Witches; these are the three witches who foretell Macbeth's future.

For the next series, Miroirs, the artist was inspired by a poem by Baudelaire, Les Litanies de Satan [Satan’s Litanies]:

“Prince of exiles, exiled Prince who, wronged, yet rises ever stronger from defeat”.

It is this text that runs around the figures caught in these mirrors.

Even when he is content to work on paper, the hand of the sculptor is never far away. He is constantly driven by the desire to give paper thickness by embossing, crumpling, gluing several sheets together and adding acrylic paint. Little by little, he gives body to his images.

Jaume Plensa was born in Barcelona in 1955, where he studied at the Llotja School of Design and Art and the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. Since 1980, the year of his first exhibition in Barcelona, he has lived and worked in Berlin, Brussels, England, France and the United States, and is now based in Barcelona.

Several exhibitions have recently been devoted to Plensa, including La part du sacré at the BAM in Mons (Belgium), Poesia del Silencio at the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona (Spain) and Invisível e Indizível at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba (Brazil).

A monograph devoted to his drawings was published by Skira in 2022.

Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris
JAUME PLENSA
Miroirs
collages
January 18th, 2024 - March 9th, 2024