Jaume Plensa – Nocturne II

Nocturne II (2016) is a hand-signed and numbered etching on wove paper, published in an edition of 30.

A seated figure curls inward, head bowed, its entire body woven from overlapping musical staff lines, notes, clefs, and fragments of handwritten score rather than solid form, so densely layered that the silhouette barely separates from the notation surrounding it. Printed in black on silvery-grey paper, the effect is closer to a body materializing out of sound than a figure simply drawn.

The etching extends Plensa's long-running practice of constructing the human form from language and music rather than flesh, a method most visible in his letter-built sculptures, here turned toward the hushed, interior register the title's nocturne suggests.

Jaume Plensa (b. 1955, Barcelona) is a Catalan sculptor and printmaker whose work spans monumental public installations, gallery sculpture, and a decades-long graphic arts practice. He trained at Barcelona's Llotja School of Art and Design and the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts before holding his first exhibition in the city in 1980, and has since taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and as a guest professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Barcelona.

Plensa's practice centers on the human figure as a vessel for language, sound, and consciousness. Working across cast iron, stainless steel, glass, resin, and paper, he builds bodies out of letters, numbers, and musical notation rather than solid mass, treating the figure as something assembled from the words and sounds that shape human thought rather than fixed physical form.

His public commissions have placed sculpture in cities across Europe, North America, and Asia. Crown Fountain, unveiled in Chicago's Millennium Park in 2004, marked a turning point in his international career and led to further works including Dream (2009, Merseyside), Nomade (2007, Antibes), and Water's Soul (2020, Jersey City). His sculpture has also been the subject of museum surveys, among them a 2011 retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chaos-Saliva at Madrid's Reina Sofía in 2000.

His work is held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, among others. Recognition includes the Medaille de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture (1993), Spain's National Prize for Fine Art (2012), and the Velázquez Prize for the Arts (2013).

Printmaking has run alongside Plensa's sculpture since the start of his career, and in 2013 he received the National Graphic Arts Award from the Calcografía Nacional in Madrid. His editions are handled by Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris and New York, alongside the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago. In etchings such as Nocturne II, the same interest in language as physical material appears at an intimate scale, the figure built from dense fields of handwritten notation rather than the steel and stone of his public sculpture.