A five-metre white marble bust with closed eyes stands in the law faculty courtyard of the University of Salzburg, steps from the Cathedral. Walk of Modern Art piece number nine, by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, installed 2010.
The Story
The sculpture's subject was a Dominican girl whose face Plensa scanned in three dimensions before scaling the portrait to five metres and carving it from stacked slabs of white marble. The name came separately. Awilda was a legendary Scandinavian princess who refused an arranged marriage, took to the sea, and became a pirate captain: a figure of female agency that Plensa attached to a work already about inner life and self-containment.
The closed eyes are deliberate. Plensa's portrait figures do not look outward. They are turned inward even as they dominate the space around them: calm, enormous, and entirely self-sufficient. In a university courtyard where hundreds of students pass daily, the effect is quietly strange. The bust does not register the traffic around it.
The construction is more complex than the smooth surface suggests. Twenty marble slabs are stacked on a concealed steel spine, each slab cut to precise thickness and bolted into place. The joins are nearly invisible at ground level but catch the light from above. When the sun is low, the stacked layers create a subtle wave across the surface of the face.
Awilda is the ninth piece in Salzburg's Walk of Modern Art, commissioned by the Salzburg Foundation and installed in spring 2010. The courtyard location was chosen partly for its daily foot traffic: the Foundation wanted the piece to function as an encounter rather than a destination.
Visiting
The Dietrichsruh courtyard of the University of Salzburg's Toskana-Trakt, Faculty of Law, near Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse. Free and accessible year-round during university hours. A short walk through Kapitelgasse from the Cathedral. The full Walk of Modern Art route including all pieces takes approximately 1.5-2 hours.
