© Jaume Plensa / BONO. Photo: © Kristina A. Kvåle / Ekebergparken
Chloé
- Date 2019
- Unveiled 2019
- Material Stainless steel
- Dimensions 310 x 78 x 137 cm
«Every human being is a “place”. Every woman, man, child, old person is a habitable space as such, which moves and develops; a place corresponding to a time, a geography, a volume and colour. [...] Each time a human being dies, a house is closed, and a “place” is lost. My work is their memory.»
Photo: © Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy Studio Plensa
Jaume Plensa
(b. Barcelona, Spain, 1955)
Jaume Plensa is an award-winning artist who works within the fields of sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and poetry. He is best known for his monumental sculptures of human heads and bodies, installed in public spaces around the world. He studied in his hometown Barcelona, at Llotja School of Art and Design and Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. Since then, he has worked and lived in Berlin, Brussels, and several places in England, France and the U.S. He has teached at, amongst other institutions, Ècole Nationale Supèriore des Beaux-Arts in Paris and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has done many large, public commissions; The Crown Fountain, Chicago (2004), Water’s Soul, Newport (2020), and The House of Light and Love, Taipei (2024), to mention a few. Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, England, housed a large exhibition of his work back in 2011.
The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is especially known for his large public works, made of a wide variety of materials such as steel, cast iron, marble, glass, light, water and sound. He is perhaps best known for his elongated and elliptically shaped faces. Plensa's artwork is modelled on real people and digitally processed. By walking around the sculptures, you experience a distorted perspective.
Chloé is a part of a long series of sculptural heads that Plensa has developed and worked on for many years. They depict the faces of young people with eyes closed whose dreamlike qualities aim to transform both the surroundings and the viewers. Plensa models the sculptures on real people, scanning the faces of the models and distorting their profile by compressing the depth. This gives the work a dynamic and photographic quality. There are many versions of Chloé all over the world, in different materials and sizes. The first versions had visible seams where the cast shapes were joined together. However, Chloé in the Ekeberg Sculpture Park is cast in one piece and shows a smooth, unbroken surface.
Chloé is in a kind of quiet conversation with her surroundings, the panorama of the busy capital, the nature and the visitors on the viewpoint. Plensa seeks to create a peaceful and comfortable meeting with the audience. The sculpture isn’t there to create conflict, but rather to open up for quiet contemplation as a collective.
Guided tours
Experience Chloé and many of the other artworks in the collection with our art mediators. We offer guided tours for private groups all year round.