In November 2012, Jaume Plensa (Spanish, born 1955) arrived in Buffalo to oversee the installation of his large-scale work Laura on the Albright-Knox’s campus.

This twenty-foot-tall sculpture of a female head is the artist’s rendering of a fourteen-year-old family friend from Barcelona who the artist chose as a subject because he felt she embodied a classic and timeless beauty. Plensa intentionally depicted the girl with her eyes closed to emphasize the world of dreams and ideas possible to a youth of that age.

The sculpture is composed of twenty laser-cut slabs of Macael marble from a quarry in the south of Spain. The technique used to stack the marble slabs - placing each between thin layers of lead - is the same technique used by the Romans to build the marble columns of their ancient temples; this is referenced by the placement of the work in front of the columns of the museum’s 1905 Albright Building.

 - Albright-Knox (online Nov. 2014)