Loading...

Escultures per portar a la mà, 1968 (2000)

Sculptures to Be Carried in the Hand, 1968 (2000)
Photograph, 39.8 x 29.8 cm

In 1968 […] he was making little sculptures that were scraps of paper, discoloured, cut or torn and pasted, sometimes folded into steps. He had three that were no more than three or four centimetres long at most. He said that he wanted to make a poor, ephemeral art, because poverty was what he had learned in real life. And weakness. These little statues were monuments of paper, weak, to the great men. Bronze and stone are inhuman materials that demand effort and money, and crush you. A monument of paper can be set at the edge of the grass in a park. It is better that the rain or the wind should carry it away. It is more human.

He wanted be useful. He wanted to make little drawn statues of paper, so that people could cut them out. He also drew clothes for cutting out, little suits, so that people could put them on and take them off. He said that he was interested in weakness. That he felt that an industrial art, such as film, is strong, and that, in contrast, pure art can only be the personal experiment, weak. […] He was very interested in relics, in desiccating things, as a kind of denial of sensibility and qualities. Being desiccated indicates that a thing is no longer of any use. It runs counter to the desire to possess. When this is done with a bubble [of soap], which is already ephemeral by definition, the desiccated is very disturbing to the man who expects the things he possesses to be solid. […] From time to time he puts a work in a public place. Nobody notices.

Alexandre Cirici, 1970


Technical details

Original title:
Escultures per portar a la mà
Registration number:
1529
Artist:
Llena, Antoni
Date created:
1968 (2000)
Date acquired:
2000
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
Object type:
Photograph
Media:
Gelatin silver print on photographic paper. Photo by Antoni Bernad
Dimensions:
39.8 x 29.8 cm (height x width)
Credits:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
Copyright:
© Antoni Llena, VEGAP, Barcelona
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.

If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.