Jaume Plensa: “Sculpture is a place you can always come back to”

Jaume Plensa’s art builds bridges between the material and the intangible. His sculptures speak a universal language and are displayed in public spaces around the world. Only ARTIKA offers the unique opportunity to get your hands on an exclusive Plensa original.

From Tokyo to Madrid

You can find Jaume Plensa’s sculptures all over the world. His signature sculpted heads capture the attention of travellers and locals alike, fascinated by figures that, with a simple finger to the lips or closed eyes, call for silence and a moment of introspection.

The faces that Plensa chooses to sculpt these pieces are of real people. They are sculptures with a soul, and that is why we see ourselves in them. They are also works of art that we find in open spaces, outside the walls of museums. This vision of art as an element that is part of everyday life in a public space is one of Plensa's great contributions.

Still from the documentary Can You Hear Me?, 2020, by Pedro Ballesteros.

In Can You Hear Me? (Pedro Ballesteros, 2020) the artist expresses it in his own words. “This is exactly what I intend to offer: intimacy. A place of shelter, where the individual can feel protected”. These privileged spaces can be found in New York, Montreal, Daejeon (South Korea) or Fredrikstad (Norway).

In My Faith, in My Hope, in My Love, 2018. Phønixbrygga, Fredrikstad, Norway.

Photo from www.jaumeplensa.com.

For Plensa, it is important that anyone who comes across one of his sculptures connects with it on both a physical and emotional level. “Architecture has become a bunch of giants and we’ve become little ants. The is the reason I want art to make new spaces that protect us, that embrace us, possible”.

Where do great ideas come from?

From simply a sketch in the artist’s mind, a work of art grows into a piece with a place in the real world, capable of changing how we see things and the way we act.

To that end, Jaume Plensa’s studio is much more than just a physical space where he turns designs into matter that have textures, weight, dimensions – this is just the part of the process that we can see.

Image of his studio, included in the Jaume Plensa 61 Art Book.

Nevertheless, Plensa makes it abundantly clear that his studio always travels with him: it is in his head. It is the place where ideas take shape, where sculptures appear in detail, before they are even recognisable in the real world.

The only way to tap into this intimate world of the artist is through a one-of-a-kind work: Jaume Plensa 61. In it, Plensa discusses ideas and materials, the power of words and the path of knowledge and inspiration.

Different examples of pages from the Jaume Plensa 61 Study Book

The mirror of the soul

Why do these sculptures represent heads? For Plensa, the face is a gift we give to others: it is a reflection of who we are and how we feel. “I think the artists who worked on Easter Island took the same approach as I did, which is also seen in the great Olmec heads in Mexico and the lovely Buddha heads”.

One of these portraits is of a girl called Mar, which the artist chose exclusively for ARTIKA. This face with a name of its own features in the sculpture-case of our edition of Jaume Plensa 61. “She is a girl who was born in China but lives in Madrid”. That is why she is at once an example of diversity and of everything that makes us unique.

“Sculpture is the relationship between the material and the immaterial. It is what creates the bridge between our tangible humanity and our soul, which is impossible to touch”. This artist's book bridges both worlds: it defines Jaume Plensa's art exclusively and is a work of art in its own right.

A peek into Jaume Plensa’s creative process

• Jaume Plensa 61 is a numbered edition, signed by the artist and limited to 2,998 copies.

• It offers a journey through the essence of artistic creation through never before published images and inspiring insights.           

• It includes a Study Book, which contains fragments of his sketchbooks and projects.

• This edition gives us the opportunity to discover how an internationally renowned artist develops his ideas.​​​​​​​

• It is also an opportunity to acquire an original sculpture by Plensa, representing one of his characteristic faces with closed eyes.