Wonderland Sculpture

The sculpture by Barcelona-based Jaume Plensa unveiled recently in front of the new Bow Building in downtown Calgary is a good example. Depicting a young girl’s head, 12-metres high and rendered in white bent-wire, this enigmatic bust gazes serenely at the comings and goings of a city just starting to flex its urban muscles.

Plensa’s piece, titled Wonderland, is one of those artworks whose utter directness belies its subtle complexity, not to mention its outlandishness. The juxtapositions of form and content, scale and subject, presence and absence, provoke a more nuanced response than the casual passer by might have expected.

The choice of material, for instance, sets up one of the basic contradictions of the work. From a distance, the head seems almost opaque, the steel mesh resolves into a solid surface and the soft curves and contours of the face and hair are revealed.

Up close, however, the sense of solidity evaporates, giving way to something that appears flimsy, almost non-existent. The image dissolves into an abstract grid of a square mesh, a map of a human head

Curiously, Plensa has added two door-sized openings that enable visitors literally to wander through Wonderland. This is something Calgarians do with remarkable frequency. Any hour of the day or night it seems someone’s there, taking photographs or just wanting to take in the full experience of walking through the piece.