The Secret Heart, at the doors of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the UB
The installation The Secret Heart will be inaugurated on Thursday afternoon, 28 September in an institutional event and the piece will be located at the main door of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Barcelona (campus Clínic, Carrer Casanova). The installation will be on display free of charge until Monday afternoon, 2 October. The piece is 13 meters high by 9.5 meters wide (27 meters in diameter) and weighs 150 kg. It was exhibited, for the first time, in 2014, at the Augsburg-Oberhausen gasworks (Germany).
A work exhibited in Germany in 2014
The artist Jaume Plensa exhibited The Secret Heart in Ausburg, invited by the city's Museum Consortium in three different spaces: in the contemporary art center H2 Centrum für Gegenwartskunts im Glaspalast, in the Schaezlerpalais, and in the gas tank Gaskeel. In the Gaskeel, Jaume Plensa created an inflatable heart that, by filling the space, transformed the old gas tank into a body full of life.
The Secret Heart was constructed seeking for maximum realism, with synthetic fabrics and hand-painted following the shapes and colors of anatomy models and treatises. In 2014, accompanying the installation in Augsburg was an audio recording in homage to the text Das Geheimherz der Uhr (The Secret Heart of the Clock) by Elias Canetti. Plensa created a voice clock by recording the voices of a multitude of men and women in the city of Augsburg, following the actual passing of seconds, minutes and hours.
In October 2020, the artist Jaume Plensa already gave one of his sculptures to Hospital Clínic as a tribute and to thank all the health staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sculpture, entitled Blue, was a face sculpted in a large basalt rock that exceeded two meters in height and weighed two and a half tons. It was placed in the main lobby of the Hospital (Carrer de Villarroel).