Paula
Artist: Jaume Plensa (Spanish, born 1955)
Date: 2013
Dimensions:
276 3/4 × 39 × 122 1/16 in. (703 × 99 × 310 cm)
Medium: Cast iron
Classification: Sculpture
Credit Line: Purchased with funds given in memory of Frank Snug by his family, from Margy and Scott Trumbull, and from Tom and Betsy Brady, and purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 2017.11
Label Text:Paula draws you in with an intimacy and vulnerability that belies its monumental size. The sculpture is part of a series of sculptures of elongated heads of adolescent girls, poised between childhood and womanhood, that, according to Jaume Plensa, “have a strange interior beauty. They are not yet formed on the outside.”
Plensa scans an image of his subject into a computer so that the face can be stretched and manipulated into a three-dimensional sculpture that plays with perception and perspective. If you view Paula from certain angles, it seems fully in the round; but as you walk around it, the sculpture seems to flatten out and you see that its dimensions are in fact very narrow.
Plensa scans an image of his subject into a computer so that the face can be stretched and manipulated into a three-dimensional sculpture that plays with perception and perspective. If you view Paula from certain angles, it seems fully in the round; but as you walk around it, the sculpture seems to flatten out and you see that its dimensions are in fact very narrow.
On view
In Collection(s)