Jaume Plensa - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips

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  • Kneeled Shadow is a superb example of Jaume Plensa’s investigation into the complexities of human experience. Renowned for his monumental sculptures and public installations, Plensa uses letters to explore communication between individuals and cultures. The striking Kneeled Shadow is a paragon of Plensa’s marriage of letters with the human form. Composed of a “skin” of letters from the Latin alphabet, Plensa’s figure analogizes letters as the fundamental component of language and culture, capable of being infinitely rearranged and recorded to communicate across generations. With its faceless figure, the present work represents both everyone and no one, poetically expressing the universal elements of the human experience.

    "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
    Of working with metal, Plensa has recounted: “I was dreaming about the moment when the mountains were formed, the moment when everything was liquid and hot and suddenly started to cool, solidify, and take shape. For me, there’s a mythical element in the way fire transforms things into liquid. Something solid becomes liquid and then becomes an object again.”i  Executed in steel, Kneeled Shadow is paradoxically industrial and ethereal. The silver of the metal contrasts with the works’ fluid forms and lattice-like construction. Kneeling on a natural stone, the work appears as if suspended in mid-air in an exquisite, spiritual experience. 

     

    i Jaume Plensa, “WE, 2008,” Vancouver Biennale, 2009, online

    • Description

      Please note that this Lot is located in Minnesota. If you wish to inspect the work in person prior to bidding, please contact Laura Bishai (lbishai@phillips.com) to arrange a viewing.

    • Provenance

      Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
      Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2008)
      Phillips, New York, May 16, 2018, lot 372
      Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

    • Literature

      Jaume Plensa: One Thought Fills Immensity, Milan, 2018, p. 23

Property from an Important Private American Collection

389

Kneeled Shadow

welded pressed steel and boulder
92 x 59 x 87 in. (233.7 x 149.9 x 221 cm)
Executed in 2008.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$350,000 - 550,000 

Sold for $403,200

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022