On the occasion of its next Modern and Contemporary Art auction on Wednesday 25 November 2020, the PIASA auction house is offering collectors many works of art by emblematic artists of the second half of the 20th century, including Jaume Plensa.
Considered one of the most important sculptors of his time, Jaume Plensa trained at the La Llotja School, Barcelona's Higher School of Design and Art, and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. After living in several European cities and in the United States, where he also taught (as at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago), he now lives and works in Barcelona.
His first sculptures, to which our work bears witness (Untitled, 1986), executed in cast iron, are highly expressive. In contrast to the quietness of his large heads with closed eyes, this work exudes a disturbing power: "Sculpture, my sculpture at least, is closer to fossilised footprints than fresh ones..." said Jaume Plensa.
Jaume Plensa (born 1955)
Untitled, 1986
Estimation: 50000 / 80000 €
Their flayed material links them to a kind of original chaos, which inspired Thierry Prat, in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Philippe Guimiot gallery, where it was exhibited in 1987, to write the following lines: "Emerging from the steaming ground, an archaic form, aggressive and full of urban violence, which is constructed and formalized in the tradition of the craft, in the unfinished, the accidental and the interrupted, which links Plensa to Rodin or De Kooning. There is something of Shelley's "Prometheus Delivered" in Jaume Plensa's work, which made the Titan the symbol of human revolt against the tyranny of matter and of his aspirations for truth and the ideal. »
