Artist: Jaume Plensa

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York presents a solo exhibition by Jaume Plensa, Silent Diary, highlighting new works on paper and premiering a sculptural form entirely new to the artist’s oeuvre.

Best known for his monumental public-facing works in portraiture, drawing has long been a rich part of Plensa’s practice and was the focus of two recent institutional solo exhibitions: In small places, close to home at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK (2022) and La lumière veille, dessins 1982-2022 at Musée Picasso, Antibes, France (2022). New drawings referencing influential poets will be on view, complemented by a selection of sculptures, the forms of which are comprised of characters from various alphabets, highlighting language and poetry as recurring sources of inspiration in the artist’s practice.

Plensa’s works on paper often combine mixed media and collage, imbuing the works with a sculptural quality. In large scale drawings, Plensa geometrically arranges clippings of poems by masters of the genre—among them T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire—merging the literary and visual arts. These collages are accented by shadowing and reliefs of abstracted portraiture, bringing depth to the two-dimensional forms. The artist has likened his approach to drawing and collage to the human body, bringing many individual elements together to form a more important whole. Plensa’s practice is guided by a desire to create unity through connections of the body and collective memory, and with these drawings offers an expression of a reflective inner world.

In the small gallery space, a series of drawings that reference Shakespeare’s Macbeth will be on view. The story has long fascinated Plensa, who in 2023 contributed stage direction, costumes, and set design to a new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, Spain. In this new collection of drawings, Plensa considers the theme of sleeplessness in Shakespeare’s play, crafting dark and difficult to discern works that invoke the ominous paranoia of the story’s protagonist. In SLEEP NO MORE (2023), Plensa pairs imagery of wire busts, a common form in his sculptural practice, with text of the iconic phrase for which the work is titled. The heads appear back-to-back, seemingly morphing into one, while shadows obscure Shakespeare’s words to varying degrees, rendering some nearly illegible. Here, Plensa’s exploration of what the viewer sees—or does not see—recalls the role of Birnam Wood in Macbeth and the illusion of the advancing forest.

The large-scale sculpture UTOPIA (2024), is on view, marking the debut of an entirely new sculptural form in the artist’s practice. Rendered in Cor-Ten steel, the sculpture reads “utopia,” the state of being from which it derives its title. With each letter composed of an amalgamation of characters from various alphabets, this work celebrates the diversity in our shared humanity and envisions a more beautiful world characterized by this unity. While Plensa has often incorporated language in his sculptures, UTOPIA is the first sculpture to do so in a horizontal means; this is also the artist’s first alphabet-based work to be rendered in Cor-Ten steel. With this work, Plensa demonstrates the continued innovation of his sculptural practice and his ongoing commitment to discovering the perfect material and technology for each individual work.