Jaume Plensa - Beeing Here

Exhibition Catalogue of the exhibition Jaume Plensa. Beeing Here, presented at the Valencia Museum of Art (9 November 2024 - 4 May 2025).

Born in Barcelona in 1955, Jaume Plensa began exhibiting his work in the early 1980s with cut-out and welded sheet metal and cast steel volumes, followed by installations using increasingly varied techniques.

Borrowings from literature and poetry, sometimes his own, blended words and quotations with the sculpted or drawn material. In the 1990s, the light and transparency of glass and resin accompanied a new awareness of the human body and its scale. A family of anonymous, meditative silhouettes now populates Jaume Plensa's universe.

In 1994, he was invited by the city of Valence to exhibit in the urban space and in the rooms of the municipal museum. Rather than exhibit in the museum, the artist chose to create 21 doors in cast steel, which he had installed in 21 emblematic locations in the city. Responding to the city's renewed invitation, the internationally-renowned sculptor and draughtsman delivered a 4-metre-high sculpture in stainless steel. Composed from the different alphabets of the world, the letters and symbols intertwine randomly like metal lace, creating a silhouette that, when seated, evokes both the human body and a universal community.

The book offers a free stroll between the proposal imagined in 1994 and the one conceived for the Place des Ormeaux in 2024, in the heart of the historic centre. It also gives pride of place to the artist's graphic work. Drawings and prints are closely linked to the human body and are associated with the words of the greatest poets and playwrights - Dante, Baudelaire and Shakespeare... - and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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