Jaume Plensa. Être là

Exhibition at the Musée de Valence, 9 November 2024 - 4 May 2025

Since the early 1980s, the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa (1955-) has been creating and exhibiting volumes in cut and welded sheet metal and cast steel, and installations using an increasingly wide range of techniques. Borrowings from literature and poetry, sometimes his own, combine words and quotations with the sculpted or drawn material. Today, a family of anonymous, meditative silhouettes populates Jaume Plensa's universe.

In 1994, invited by the city of Valencia, the artist chose to create 21 doors in cast steel, which he had installed in 21 emblematic places in the city rather than exhibiting in the museum. In 2024, in response to the city's renewed invitation, Plensa created a monumental sculpture in stainless steel, in which letters and symbols from the world's different alphabets intertwine, unfolding the design of a silhouette which, when seated, evokes a human body as much as a universal community.

This 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. His drawings and prints have a close relationship with the human body, and are associated with the words of the greatest poets and playwrights - Dante, Baudelaire and Shakespeare - as well as those of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.