Jaume Plensa: Silent Diary

Opening reception: Thursday, May 9, 2024, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present 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.