Artist:
Jaume Plensa
Title:
Endless V
Year:
2012
Adress:
Santa Monica Blvd
www.artatsite.com:
The following articles are about the artworks 'Endless', 'Possibilities', 'We', 'Endless', 'El alma del Ebro', 'Roots' and others. The common element in these artworks is the sitting figure made of letters.
www.phillips.com:
Internationally renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is celebrated for his large-scale, text-based sculptures in stainless steel, which, despite their striking originality, share much thematically with classical sculpture in their concern with aesthetic beauty and earnest expression of the human soul. Towering over seven feet tall, ENDLESS is a remarkable example of Plensa’s ability to weave symbols together in a compelling alphabetical chainmail that probes ideas of collective memory and the duality between the concrete and the intangible. The present work depicts a seated figure with arms clasped around his body, his evocative pose alluding to Auguste Rodin’s seminal The Thinker, circa 1910. Like Rodin’s sculpture, the figure in ENDLESS seems lost in thought, yet his muscles are coiled and tensed as if ready to spring into motion, embodying both dream and action.
While Plensa’s first text-based sculptures were often calibrated in recognizable fragments of texts, in recent years his works have become increasingly abstract as Plensa draws together characters from diverse lexicons to suggest the rich multiculturalism of society.
The present work fuses symbols from myriad alphabets, providing visual dimension and texture through the disparate shapes formed in the fragments of each language. As Plensa explains, 'I’ve always been fascinated by words and poetry. I remember one day I decided to use, as a material, all this information that I collected in childhood ... I understood the text as a beautiful metaphor about community, about society. One letter alone is nothing, but together with other letters you get a word. A word with a word becomes a text, and so on. A person alone is nothing, but together with others we become family, a neighborhood, a city, a county, a country'. Jaume Plensa, quoted in Ginny Van Alyea, 'An Interview with Artist Jaume Plensa', Chicago Gallery News, November 8, 2017, online.
www.citywatchla.com:
As you can see from the picture, it is a stainless steel sculpture of a seated human made up of a lattice of letters and characters of eight different languages: English, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, etc ... similar to the demographics of Beverly Hills. My interpretation: Mankind is made up of many different cultures and languages, yet we are made with the same material reminding ourselves to love, understand and appreciate each other.
To fully realize what a great treasure this sculpture is, you must know the work of the artist Jaume Plensa who has been at the center of the contemporary art world for a long time as an artist, instructor, and guest speaker.
www.mori.art.museum:
The sculpture expresses the universal nature of global culture and the bonds that tie humanity together, and also the vision of new culture and lifestyles, taking root around Toranomon Hills, to give life to new ideas and innovation for the revitalization of the Toranomon area.
www.thecollector.com:
With the romantic manifesto that art has a tremendous capacity to change the world, Jaume Plensa keeps creating bridges between humans, poetry and art.
'Possibilities' is one of the figures that Jaume Plensa calls ‘nomads’ due to their pilgrimage presence around the world. Made entirely of steel letters from a combination of alphabets (Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Cyrillic, and Hindu) the sculpture offers us a new place to inhabit with a new language to read. Acting as an extra skin of words, Possibilities explores the power of letters, understanding them as biological cells that need others to communicate and create words, invent languages, and shape cultures. The use of the written word in the human anatomy denotes how intertwined poetry is with our bodies. If ‘each human being is a place’ as Plensa claims, then that is a place to invite others to come in.
Plensa envisioned the piece as a way to celebrate the city’s history, growth and diversity. Even the title commemorates the origins and roots of Montréal, as the word source is shared by both languages, French and English. Composed by elements from multiple alphabets, Source stands as a symbol for the rich and inclusive culture of the city. A metaphor for language as a bridge that connects people across different eras and backgrounds. In Plensa’s words, ‘Sometimes you must breathe a certain soul in a street or an urban context to push people to be together.’ An almost breathing soul that dominates the urban landscape as a gathering place for its citizens and visitors to dream, Source intends to connect the vibrations of humans with their environments.
When Jaume Plensa was a child he used to hide within his father’s piano. He recalls the feeling of becoming one with music, the vibration and sound filling the inner space, the mind and soul. The theory of echoing energy waves is explored in Jerusalem as an invitation to play and beat the gongs, to feel and vibrate with the sound. The reflective qualities of bronze interplay with the projected light and dark ambiance of the place enhancing mystery.
www.wikipedia.org:
'El alma del Ebro' was created for the International Exposition in Zaragoza, the theme of which was "Water and Sustainable Development". It is eleven meters high, the sculpted letters representing cells of the human body which is over 60% water. Its white letters and hollow structure invite the viewer to look inside and reflect on the relationship between human beings and water. A similar sculpture entitled Singapore Soul (2011) was installed in front of the Ocean Financial Centre in Singapore. And an ensemble piece entitled I, You, She, He... with three figures composed of the letters, each seated on large flat boulders.
www.forbes.com:
Powerful and silent, they display serene facial expressions with their eyes closed, as if dreaming or meditating. It is a call to look inward to understand the beauty hidden inside oneself for a more honest relationship with oneself.
The 64-year-old Barcelona-based artist places utmost importance on the interaction between the audience and his work. By introducing art into the public sphere, he transforms the space and enriches a community with beauty by bringing art to all and not just to the elite.
The idea is to use ordinary people in pieces of monumental public art. Plensa's models are real people - often young girls - whose likenesses he captures using a laser scanner, before he manipulates, elongates and flattens the image using 3-D computer modeling software. The heads are stretched, like an optical illusion, as if you were looking at them from an angle. Rather than a straightforward portrait, he plays with proportions, giving a sense of spirituality to the faces, as he examines the relationship between body and soul.
Plensa repeatedly uses lexical elements in his work, where he sometimes incorporates letters and words; other times, entire quotations from classic literature by poets like Shakespeare or William Blake. "Art many times is just a beautiful excuse to transform the way that you look at the reality around you, and it's also the idea of communication, building bridges, putting people in touch with one another," says Plensa.
"All these elements are so important in my work. That's probably the reason why I choose alphabets for my projects. These alphabets from different cultures, all working together, create an amazing and dynamic effect of beauty. That's a very positive message to the world: how weIl we are when we are together. Obviously, I'm not able to speak many ofthe languages, but I love Japanese and Chinese. When I'm there, I listen and watch the way they write their own words. An alphabet is probably the best portrait of one culture, and to put all these alphabets together is a beautiful metaphor for our world today."
If we have something different from animaIs, it's our capacity to talk and communicate. I love music and, for me, words are like music. The instrument is our body and we are permanently playing this music, which is our conversation. The capacity to spread words in space fills everything with energy. I love this invisible energy surrounding us, creating amazing clouds that embrace us like in a dream.
Years ago, I did a big video project in Chicago, The Crown Fountain, where I filmed 1,000 faces of people living there. During that period, I stretched faces to get exactly the proportions that I wanted. The elongation of my heads today is in exactly the same proportions that I had done in video in Chicago, but in marbIe or alabaster. 1 love this kind of elongation because it gives a certain spirituality to the person. It loses materiality in some ways; it's much lighter. It loses weight in an essential way.
www.wikipedia.org:
Jaume Plensa (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈʒawmə ˈplɛnsə]; born 1955) is a Spanish artist and sculptor.
The following articles are about the artworks 'Endless', 'Possibilities', 'We', 'Endless', 'El alma del Ebro', 'Roots' and others. The common element in these artworks is the sitting figure made of letters.
www.phillips.com:
Internationally renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is celebrated for his large-scale, text-based sculptures in stainless steel, which, despite their striking originality, share much thematically with classical sculpture in their concern with aesthetic beauty and earnest expression of the human soul. Towering over seven feet tall, ENDLESS is a remarkable example of Plensa’s ability to weave symbols together in a compelling alphabetical chainmail that probes ideas of collective memory and the duality between the concrete and the intangible. The present work depicts a seated figure with arms clasped around his body, his evocative pose alluding to Auguste Rodin’s seminal The Thinker, circa 1910. Like Rodin’s sculpture, the figure in ENDLESS seems lost in thought, yet his muscles are coiled and tensed as if ready to spring into motion, embodying both dream and action.
While Plensa’s first text-based sculptures were often calibrated in recognizable fragments of texts, in recent years his works have become increasingly abstract as Plensa draws together characters from diverse lexicons to suggest the rich multiculturalism of society.
The present work fuses symbols from myriad alphabets, providing visual dimension and texture through the disparate shapes formed in the fragments of each language. As Plensa explains, 'I’ve always been fascinated by words and poetry. I remember one day I decided to use, as a material, all this information that I collected in childhood ... I understood the text as a beautiful metaphor about community, about society. One letter alone is nothing, but together with other letters you get a word. A word with a word becomes a text, and so on. A person alone is nothing, but together with others we become family, a neighborhood, a city, a county, a country'. Jaume Plensa, quoted in Ginny Van Alyea, 'An Interview with Artist Jaume Plensa', Chicago Gallery News, November 8, 2017, online.
www.citywatchla.com:
As you can see from the picture, it is a stainless steel sculpture of a seated human made up of a lattice of letters and characters of eight different languages: English, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, etc ... similar to the demographics of Beverly Hills. My interpretation: Mankind is made up of many different cultures and languages, yet we are made with the same material reminding ourselves to love, understand and appreciate each other.
To fully realize what a great treasure this sculpture is, you must know the work of the artist Jaume Plensa who has been at the center of the contemporary art world for a long time as an artist, instructor, and guest speaker.
www.mori.art.museum:
The sculpture expresses the universal nature of global culture and the bonds that tie humanity together, and also the vision of new culture and lifestyles, taking root around Toranomon Hills, to give life to new ideas and innovation for the revitalization of the Toranomon area.
www.thecollector.com:
With the romantic manifesto that art has a tremendous capacity to change the world, Jaume Plensa keeps creating bridges between humans, poetry and art.
'Possibilities' is one of the figures that Jaume Plensa calls ‘nomads’ due to their pilgrimage presence around the world. Made entirely of steel letters from a combination of alphabets (Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Cyrillic, and Hindu) the sculpture offers us a new place to inhabit with a new language to read. Acting as an extra skin of words, Possibilities explores the power of letters, understanding them as biological cells that need others to communicate and create words, invent languages, and shape cultures. The use of the written word in the human anatomy denotes how intertwined poetry is with our bodies. If ‘each human being is a place’ as Plensa claims, then that is a place to invite others to come in.
Plensa envisioned the piece as a way to celebrate the city’s history, growth and diversity. Even the title commemorates the origins and roots of Montréal, as the word source is shared by both languages, French and English. Composed by elements from multiple alphabets, Source stands as a symbol for the rich and inclusive culture of the city. A metaphor for language as a bridge that connects people across different eras and backgrounds. In Plensa’s words, ‘Sometimes you must breathe a certain soul in a street or an urban context to push people to be together.’ An almost breathing soul that dominates the urban landscape as a gathering place for its citizens and visitors to dream, Source intends to connect the vibrations of humans with their environments.
When Jaume Plensa was a child he used to hide within his father’s piano. He recalls the feeling of becoming one with music, the vibration and sound filling the inner space, the mind and soul. The theory of echoing energy waves is explored in Jerusalem as an invitation to play and beat the gongs, to feel and vibrate with the sound. The reflective qualities of bronze interplay with the projected light and dark ambiance of the place enhancing mystery.
www.wikipedia.org:
'El alma del Ebro' was created for the International Exposition in Zaragoza, the theme of which was "Water and Sustainable Development". It is eleven meters high, the sculpted letters representing cells of the human body which is over 60% water. Its white letters and hollow structure invite the viewer to look inside and reflect on the relationship between human beings and water. A similar sculpture entitled Singapore Soul (2011) was installed in front of the Ocean Financial Centre in Singapore. And an ensemble piece entitled I, You, She, He... with three figures composed of the letters, each seated on large flat boulders.
www.forbes.com:
Powerful and silent, they display serene facial expressions with their eyes closed, as if dreaming or meditating. It is a call to look inward to understand the beauty hidden inside oneself for a more honest relationship with oneself.
The 64-year-old Barcelona-based artist places utmost importance on the interaction between the audience and his work. By introducing art into the public sphere, he transforms the space and enriches a community with beauty by bringing art to all and not just to the elite.
The idea is to use ordinary people in pieces of monumental public art. Plensa's models are real people - often young girls - whose likenesses he captures using a laser scanner, before he manipulates, elongates and flattens the image using 3-D computer modeling software. The heads are stretched, like an optical illusion, as if you were looking at them from an angle. Rather than a straightforward portrait, he plays with proportions, giving a sense of spirituality to the faces, as he examines the relationship between body and soul.
Plensa repeatedly uses lexical elements in his work, where he sometimes incorporates letters and words; other times, entire quotations from classic literature by poets like Shakespeare or William Blake. "Art many times is just a beautiful excuse to transform the way that you look at the reality around you, and it's also the idea of communication, building bridges, putting people in touch with one another," says Plensa.
"All these elements are so important in my work. That's probably the reason why I choose alphabets for my projects. These alphabets from different cultures, all working together, create an amazing and dynamic effect of beauty. That's a very positive message to the world: how weIl we are when we are together. Obviously, I'm not able to speak many ofthe languages, but I love Japanese and Chinese. When I'm there, I listen and watch the way they write their own words. An alphabet is probably the best portrait of one culture, and to put all these alphabets together is a beautiful metaphor for our world today."
If we have something different from animaIs, it's our capacity to talk and communicate. I love music and, for me, words are like music. The instrument is our body and we are permanently playing this music, which is our conversation. The capacity to spread words in space fills everything with energy. I love this invisible energy surrounding us, creating amazing clouds that embrace us like in a dream.
Years ago, I did a big video project in Chicago, The Crown Fountain, where I filmed 1,000 faces of people living there. During that period, I stretched faces to get exactly the proportions that I wanted. The elongation of my heads today is in exactly the same proportions that I had done in video in Chicago, but in marbIe or alabaster. 1 love this kind of elongation because it gives a certain spirituality to the person. It loses materiality in some ways; it's much lighter. It loses weight in an essential way.
www.wikipedia.org:
Jaume Plensa (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈʒawmə ˈplɛnsə]; born 1955) is a Spanish artist and sculptor.