Paula

Artist Jaume Plensa (Spanish, born 1955)

Date2013

Dimensions276 3/4 × 39 × 122 1/16 in. (703 × 99 × 310 cm)

MediumCast iron

ClassificationSculpture

Credit LinePurchased 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

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Sculpture Garden

Label TextPaula 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.Published ReferencesLigniti, Emily. Jaume Plensa: One Thought Fills Immensity . Milano, Italy, Skira editore S.p.A. Palazzo Casati Stampa. 2018, fig. 185 (col.) 234.

Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art; Nashville, Tennessee, Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art, Human Landscape, June 17-November 6, 2016.