CATALOGUE JAUME PLENSA'S EXHIBITIONID91302083
The winning of the Tomás Francisco Prieto Award for Medallistics in 2014 by Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955) is the direct antecedent of this exhibition, which is designed with two main aspects. Firstly, the viewer is taken on a journey through all the artist's work in graphics and multiples from recent years, while the perspective is broadened with a series of earlier pieces of special importance in the career. Secondly, in tune with his poetics, a reading of the idea of individuality (body, portrait, subject) is proposed in relation to universality (community, society, types), under the metaphor provided by the concept of "matrix" from the world of engraving and print.
The starting point for the exhibition consists of the traces of the actual body (photocopies, noises, clinical analyses, statistics), which the artist has used as the basis for many of his pieces. And yet in distancing himself from the clichés of the conventional self-portrait, autobiography and expression of the self as a unique experience, far away from the world. There is no complacency then in the myth of the genius, of this subject withdrawn from what is common by its exceptionality, but rather in his case we always come up against the proposal of an artist who lends his own face to represent the community he belongs to, articulating the image of what we have in common.
Plensa looks at himself in the mirror from a certain distance, he takes himself as the protagonist of numerous pieces in order to talk about the human species. And this is the point of arrival. In his recent work, anonymous people, people as subjets or members of the species, whatever their culture may be, take up a central place in his concerns, to such an extent that we could speak of a constant search for the archetype of the human. And this is the essence of the man who repeats himself in each one of these characters, which Plensa's work expresses suggestively, full of sensitivity in each case. This is an idea that reproduces the idea of the matrix, in its biological or material conception: in other word, as the mould and format for multiple versions of the same original.
Introduction by Óscar Alonso Molina Curator of the exhibition
The winning of the Tomás Francisco Prieto Award for Medallistics in 2014 by Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955) is the direct antecedent of this exhibition, which is designed with two main aspects. Firstly, the viewer is taken on a journey through all the artist's work in graphics and multiples from recent years, while the perspective is broadened with a series of earlier pieces of special importance in the career. Secondly, in tune with his poetics, a reading of the idea of individuality (body, portrait, subject) is proposed in relation to universality (community, society, types), under the metaphor provided by the concept of "matrix" from the world of engraving and print.
The starting point for the exhibition consists of the traces of the actual body (photocopies, noises, clinical analyses, statistics), which the artist has used as the basis for many of his pieces. And yet in distancing himself from the clichés of the conventional self-portrait, autobiography and expression of the self as a unique experience, far away from the world. There is no complacency then in the myth of the genius, of this subject withdrawn from what is common by its exceptionality, but rather in his case we always come up against the proposal of an artist who lends his own face to represent the community he belongs to, articulating the image of what we have in common.
Plensa looks at himself in the mirror from a certain distance, he takes himself as the protagonist of numerous pieces in order to talk about the human species. And this is the point of arrival. In his recent work, anonymous people, people as subjets or members of the species, whatever their culture may be, take up a central place in his concerns, to such an extent that we could speak of a constant search for the archetype of the human. And this is the essence of the man who repeats himself in each one of these characters, which Plensa's work expresses suggestively, full of sensitivity in each case. This is an idea that reproduces the idea of the matrix, in its biological or material conception: in other word, as the mould and format for multiple versions of the same original.