Irene Sieberger
Senior Specialist
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF GERARD L. CAFESJIAN
Lot 38*,AR,TP
Jaume Plensa(B. 1955)SHADOWS I
2006
2006
Amended
15 October 2021, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £300,250 inc. premium
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Jaume Plensa (B. 1955)
SHADOWS I
2006
stainless steel and stone
242 by 192 by 196 cm.
95 1/4 by 75 9/16 by 77 3/16 in.
This work was executed in 2006, and is unique.
2006
stainless steel and stone
242 by 192 by 196 cm.
95 1/4 by 75 9/16 by 77 3/16 in.
This work was executed in 2006, and is unique.
Footnotes
Provenance
Private Collection, US (acquired from the artist)
Selling exhibition: Sotheby's, Windermere, Sotheby's at Isleworth: Monumental, 2007
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Towering at nearly eight feet tall with arresting presence SHADOWS I, executed in 2006, is a stunning example of Spanish artist Jaume Plensa's text-based sculptures that transform the environments they inhabit.
Born in Barcelona, Plensa is renowned for his large sculptures and public installations, which are widely exhibited across the globe with celebrated projects in cities such as Calgary, Chicago, San Diego, Montréal, London, Paris, Dubai, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Installations of his monumental sculptures can be seen in public spaces at the Rockefeller Centre and 30 Hudson Yards in New York City, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City and Plaza de Colón in Madrid. Over the past 35 years, the artist has produced a multifaceted body of work creating sculpture that speaks to the power and beauty of humanity, bringing people together and enriching communities through their presence. He works with conventional sculptural materials like glass, steel, and bronze but has also gone further to blend this with unconventional media such as water, light and sound to create hybrid works of intricate energy and symbolic richness.
Composed of stainless-steel letters that are weaved together in a linguistic fluid form, this present work is an elegant personification of Plensa's sculptures that are so definitive of the artist's oeuvre. Here, a figure sits upon a stone plinth with its arms clasped around its legs in what appears to be a meditative and serene posture, suggesting a sense of tranquillity and peace. Despite its striking originality, we are encouraged to see parallels to the figures we identify in classical sculpture, in its concern with aesthetic beauty and earnest examination of the human soul in the most simplified form. This figure bears no expression, no facial features or the complexities of human existence. Rather than a straightforward portrait, Plensa plays with proportions thus giving instead a sense of spirituality to his faces, as he examines the relationship between body and soul. Plensa's sculptures are unique in their remarkable ability to transform the environments which they inhabit. This present lot invites a dialogue between the sculpture and the surrounding landscape which is readily visible through the interlaced letters that comprise the figure. The sculpture exists in harmony within its setting and transforms the space around it, most notably in the way in which the open and closed form of the letters alter light and shadow. This subject of transparency was of great allure to Plensa; he was intrigued with how he could bring light and its related openness to metal and found he could achieve this through this use of open weave, lattice like letters.
Plensa's work explores not only the human form, but also the role of language in the human experience. An avid reader, Plensa was fascinated with language and classical literature; he has a particular interest in the workings of Shakespeare, William Blake and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe regarding their texts as some of his main sources of inspiration. For Plensa, a language and its calligraphy, or alphabet, provided a portrait of cultures, and through the process of incorporating letters together, but without specific meaning, sought to provide a positive metaphor of our world today. He avoids any negative connotation in his work, and instead expresses messages of hope, beauty and unity, he seeks to portray feelings of unanimity despite the conventional barriers that separate humankind. He believed poetry, which for him was a far greater influence than the visual arts, to be a universal language with the capacity to bring humanity together; and has expressed his utopian vision of a world without boundaries. As the artist himself noted, "One letter alone is nothing, but together with other letters you get a word. A word with a word becomes a text, and so on. A person alone is nothing, but together with others we become family, a neighbourhood, a city, a county, a country." (The artist in an interview with Ginny Van Alyea, 'An Interview with Artist Jaume Plensa', Chicago Gallery News Online, 8 November 2017).
The present work was acquired by the prominent American collector and philanthropist Gerard L. Cafesjian. Born in 1925 in Brooklyn to Armenian immigrant parents, Mr. Cafesjian became a highly successful editor at West Publishing - a firm specialising in legal materials - and spearheaded the launch of the annual 'Art and the Law' exhibition, for which he received the prestigious Business in the Arts Award. Mr. Cafesjian's passion for collecting began with a childhood fascination with geology and gemstones, which later branched into fine art. Over the years, he patroned and developed personal relationships with world-renowned sculptors and ultimately assembled an impressive collection of both lapidary and fine works of art.
Saleroom notices
Please note that the provenance should read:
Galerie Lelong, Paris
Selling exhibition: Sotheby's, Windermere, Sotheby's at Isleworth: Monumental, 2007
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
