Jaume Plensa Isabella Jaume Plensa’s figurative and text-based works explore spirituality, beauty, and the relationship between humanity and nature. Evincing an aura of serenity, his sculptures evoke classical statuary, which represents the ideal body as a symbol of passage from the physical into the spiritual. For example, the closed eyes of Isabella (2014) suggest that she is sleeping or dreaming, but her head is upright, giving her the appearance of hovering between consciousness and detachment from the world. Many of Plensa’s figures are distorted, fragmented, or otherwise indicative of human imperfection. When Isabella is seen frontally, the head is proportioned in accordance with traditional ideals of youthful beauty. But, viewed from the side, we see that the head has been distorted, flattened into angularity. In designing the sculpture, Plensa digitally altered the source image, emphasizing the malleability of the human form (in contrast to the classical notion of ideal anatomy as a fixed expression of human perfection) while calling attention to the work’s status as an artifact of the computer age. Isabella is included in Jaume Plensa: Human Landscape, jointly organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (June 5–September 7, 2015) and Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art (May 22–November 1, 2015). Mark Scala, chief curator
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by