When I first saw images of La Llonja I could hardly believe what a beautiful space this was; I immediately set off for Palma to start planning the exhibition. The interior is completely made of stone with 20-meter twisting columns spiralling up to the arched ceiling. The large decorative windows cast sunlight across the veined marble floor and heavy wooden doors lead out to a paved piazza and the sea beyond. A space so beautiful does not need anything else and yet the challenge was to fill it with art while not upsetting the balance and mood of the interior. There are no walls to hang paintings so the whole show consists of freestanding sculpture. As I usually do, I have tried to press out beyond the venue and into the town, placing works from La Llonja and along the sea front, onto the tree covered promenade Paseo del Borne and finally into the Casal Solleric art museum nearby.
La Llonja is a very pure architecture with a simple grid layout making twelve squares around the six columns, each square marked in vivid orange marble tiles. I conceived of an exhibition in which I placed an artwork in the centre of each square, trying to echo the rhythm of the interior, a system that allows me to show four variations on three sets of work. To the left, a set of four giant striding statues in bright shiny colours walk through the space. In the centre I have tried to compete with the cathedral-like hight of the space with four intricate metal drawings of baroque towers. Then there are four new sculptures made of raw, poured concrete, depicting giant double-sided portraits that sit like traffic barriers to the right of the space. By following the logic of the floor grid, I hoped to integrate with the architecture-like statues within a church or temple. I imagine people wandering around the twelve works, looking at both the beautiful space and the artworks as an interaction.
Outside on the sunlit piazza there are crowds of tourists and people sitting at café tables while the grand facade of La Llonja towers overhead. Here too I try to compete without concealing or spoiling the view, installing two giant figures inspired by epic Egyptian stone gods, but made in modest steel I-beams that only trace the drawings of people picked from the street outside my London studio. The giant twelve-meter figures gaze across the piazza like any other visitor. You leave the cafés and the two giants to join the crowds and traffic along the sea road. Here the mood is more urban and modern, a mix of 19th Century grandeur with bronze statues on tree lined avenues, and heavy traffic passing luxury yachts. I have tried to combine these moods with a monument of my own - a hybrid equestrian monument-cum-LED traffic sign. I have animated a series of horses in motion and here show a trotting horse in life-size, moving endlessly up the street against the traffic flow on a high brick plinth, like a brightly lit sign at a petrol station.
Three more installations await you if you make it up Paseo del Borne to Casal Solleric, extending the discussion of portraits and monuments, the language of drawing and the process of recognising and reading images.