Jaume Plensa (1955 - Barcelona, Spain)
Sanna, 2013
marble and lead

About The Work

Predominantly producing figurative sculptures, Plensa has created Sanna as a larger-than-life-sized head constructed of marble and lead. "Sculpture is not only talking about volumes," he has said. "It is talking about something deep inside ourselves that without sculpture we cannot describe. We are always with one foot in normal life and one foot in the most amazing abstraction." 

“This is an example of how scale can be a critical part of the message of a work. If we saw this face in life-size form, we would surely think it is beautifully crafted, but to have the scale so monumental we watched this more closely, much like we look at Georgia O’Keeffe flowers. Sanna’s face is sublime and peaceful as we would expect a child to be, but she is also powerful because of her size.” –Kathryn Hall

Biography

For more than 25 years, Jaume Plensa has produced a rich body of work in the studio and the public realm. By combining conventional sculptural materials (glass, steel, bronze, aluminum) with more unconventional media (water, light, sound, video), and frequently incorporating text, Plensa creates hybrid works of intricate energy and psychology. His work is invested in evoking emotion and stimulating intellectual engagement. By posing conceptual dualities in his work (inside/outside, front/back, light/dark), Plensa seeks to connect with his viewers on an intuitive level. Often, the viewer participation, or the object/viewer relationship, is what completes Plensa's work.  Jaume lives and works in Barcelona.