The international sculptor will be in the holy city next Monday to explain his proposal for the main entrance to the Basilica of Vera Cruz
The project ‘La Puerta del Alma’, by Jaume Plensa, will be presented next Monday at 6 pm at a public event in the old church of La Compañía, in Caravaca de la Cruz. The artist, born in Barcelona in 1955, visited the City of the Cross at the end of December last year, at the invitation of the Vera Cruz Brotherhood to see the basilica and its surroundings. During the visit, he received and accepted with great enthusiasm the commission to prepare a proposal for the main entrance door to the temple, whose Baroque facade had only been restored a few weeks before Plensa’s visit. The door is currently covered with a metal sheet which has been repainted on several occasions, on others damage has been repaired and on several occasions the need for a final restoration has been revealed.
Plensa’s proposal was previously communicated to the representative council of the Brotherhood of Vera Cruz and now hopes to be presented in this public deed in which the author himself will intervene along with his older brother, Luis Melgarejo; and the Rector of the Basilica, Emilio Sánchez.
Plensa studied at the Llotja School of Art and Design and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. Since 1980, the year of his first exhibition in Barcelona, he has lived and worked in Berlin, Brussels, England, France and the United States and currently lives and works in Barcelona.
He was a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and regularly collaborates with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as visiting professor. He has also given numerous lectures and courses at other universities, museums and cultural institutions around the world.
He has received numerous national and international awards, including the Medaille de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French Ministry of Culture in 1993, and the National Fine Arts Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1997. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In Spain he received the National Fine Arts Award in 2012; the prestigious Velázquez Prize for the Arts, in 2013, and the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, in 2021. He received honorary doctorates from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2018 and from the Menéndez Pelayo University of Santander in 2022.
Plensa periodically shows his work in galleries and museums in Europe, the United States and Asia. A very important part of Plensa’s work is in the field of sculpture in public space. Opened in 2004 in Millennium Park (Chicago), the ‘Crown Fountain’ is one of Plensa’s greatest projects and without a doubt one of its most brilliant. The work gave rise to numerous commissions, adding to the list of his works in public spaces; with the most recent featured: ‘We’ (2021), in The Shard Quarter (London); ‘Water’s Soul’ (2020), in Newport, opposite Manhattan (Jersey City), and ‘Utopia’ (2021), at the New Welcome Center. In the same year, 2022, his work ‘Constel·lacions (2022) was installed at the Gran Teatre del Liceu’, in Barcelona, in the festive context of its 175th anniversary.
Source: La Verdad
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