Photo: Courtesy Richard Gray Gallery.
The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is turning heads in Chicago. Just as his Crown Fountain marks the tenth anniversary of its installation in the Windy City’s Millennium Park, it has been joined by four more of his giant head sculptures. The public art exhibition, “1004 Portraits,” runs through October 2015 and coincides with Plensa’s solo show at Richard Gray Gallery, “Private Dreams.”
Jaume Plensa with his sculptures Paula, Laura, and Inez in Millennium Park.
Photo: Patrick Pyska, via Huffington Post.
The massive new outdoor works portray the heads of girls between the ages of 8 and 15 with their eyes closed, their heads stretched vertically so that their features are slightly distorted. “It’s a moment when the girls are not kids anymore but they are not yet women,”Plensa told the Wall Street Journal. “They have this kind of strange interior beauty. They are not yet formed on the outside.”
The tallest, Look into My Dreams, Awilda, soars to 39 feet. “I’m trying always to create a place where people could meet and share dreams,” Plensa added. “And I probably could not find a better landscape for that to happen than the human body.”
Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain and Look into My Dreams, Awilda in Millennium Park.
Photo: Kenneth Tanaka. Courtesy Richard Gray Gallery.
An earlier work from Plensa’s series of oversize head sculptures, Echo, was installed in New York City’s Madison Square Park in 2011, and is currently on view in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.