Jaume Plensa. The poetry of Silence

La Pedrera, Barcelona. 31 March - 23 July 2023

Foundation Bancaja, Valencia. 25 November 2022 - 19 March 2023

The exhibition Jaume Plensa: The Poetry of Silence, curated by Javier Molins, features the artist’s work from 1990 to the present day and highlights key aspects of his oeuvre as a sculptor and is structured around the connections between his creative universe and letters – from various alphabets – as the constituent element of his work. According to Plensa, every letter has a unique beauty, but together they illustrate the diversity of the world and the peaceful cohabitation between different cultures. As he himself explains, ‘a letter doesn’t look like much, it’s a humble thing, but linked to others they form words, and words form texts and texts, thinking’.

Literature has always been a wellspring of inspiration for Plensa. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, William Blake, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Elias Canetti, Vicent Andrés Estellés and José Ángel Valente are just some of the writers who have been important to him throughout his life and who have been sources on which he has drawn for countless of his works. Plensa’s relationship with literature, especially poetry, is the thread that runs through this exhibition, which will also include other themes that have been constants throughout his career, among them silence, dreams and desire, music and the family.

The exhibition, which includes almost a hundred large, medium and small-format sculptures, will be presented mainly in La Pedrera exhibition rooms, but it will also spread to other areas of the building, among them the rooftop, the attic, the inner courtyards and outside the building. In this way, Plensa’s work will engage in a dialogue with this iconic edifice designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí.

Another version of this exhibition could be seen in the Foundation Bancaja in Valencia, Spain.