Jaume Plensa - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 14, 2018 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Jaume Plensa, April 9, 2011 - January 22, 2012, n.p.

  • Literature

    Jean Frémon and Wendy Parramore, The Secret Heart: Interviews, Paris, 2016, p. 94 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Over the past thirty years, Barcelona native Jaume Plensa’s monumental sculptures and installations have been exhibited across the globe, as part of the artist’s ongoing pursuit to bring beauty into everyday life. In all of his works, Plensa explores dualities – the collective versus the individual, the intellectual versus the poetic, and the spiritual versus the material. Executed in 2010, Anna VI makes manifest such dualisms, as the head of a young female girl emerges from within a pristine alabaster stone, recalling that of ancient Greek sculpture. Her facial features are elongated and abstracted, with eyes closed, suggesting a withdrawal from the external world in favor of connection with the inner self. In the artist’s own words, these elongated heads “try to touch the spirituality of the face, to transform the face into something more general…so it’s more the portrait of the soul and not the face” (Jaume Plensa, quoted in F. Douglass Schatz, “Interview with Jaume Plensa”, Nashville Arts Magazine, October 2015, online).

    Apart from form, material is equally important to Plensa’s practice. His sculptures lend a physical weight and volume to the spiritual, and transform the environments they inhabit into havens for self-exploration. Executed in pale, semi-translucent alabaster, Anna VI emanates an inner light which, for the artist, is reflective of the soul. To create these sculptures, Plensa utilizes computer modeling to render photographic images three-dimensional, elongating features and manipulating the volume of the face to a level of near-abstraction. In discussing the final product, he notes, “When you finish the portrait you realize you are not doing any specific person, you are making a kind of mural where we can feel reflective. It’s taking this kind of spiritual position, with the eyes closed, as always” (Jaume Plensa, quoted in Ginny Van Alyea, “Interview with Jaume Plensa”, Chicago Gallery News, November 8, 2017, online). Anna VI is a stunning personification of intangibles such as memory, psychology, and serenity, in which Plensa invites the viewer to meditate on his or her own position within the universe at large.

408

Anna VI

alabaster
70 x 25 5/8 x 26 in. (177.8 x 65.1 x 66 cm.)
Executed in 2010.

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $250,000

Contact Specialist
Rebekah Bowling
Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York
+ 1 212 940 1250
rbowling@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 14 November 2018