This is the Can Ginebreda bosc d’escultures (sculpture park), an ongoing project founded and maintained by local artist Xicu Cabanyes. All the exhibits within the forest are his own work, a collection which has grown to well over 100 pieces since the Seventies. Cabanyes is known for his bold style and sensual aesthetics, and the open-air gallery contains a mixture of enigmatic curvaceous abstracts, provocative larger-than-life genitalia, and explicit nudes in various poses. Although the statues are the forest’s most striking feature, it’s actually the trees that give the park its name: ginebrer is Catalan for juniper.
Situated in the Porqueres region, about two hours drive northwest of Barcelona, the enclosed forest sprawls loosely up a gradual hill. Mid-way up sits Cabanyes’s workshop, a one-storey building with one of its walls formed from concrete human bottoms, modelled from life on Cabanyes’s friends. The Catalan sculptor comes to his workshop almost every day, along with assistant Roger Guillem who has been working with him for the past few months. Inside the workshop is a treasure trove of art-in-progress and completed pieces for other exhibitions, along with Cabanyes’s ample collection of Catalan newspaper clippings featuring the park, all pinned to the wall.
Further up the hillside the forest opens out to spectacular views of the Pyrenees, still capped with a white frost even in a baking summer sun. Alongside the views stands a stone half-man, half-woman, growing from the same body into two separate kissing heads. On another peak is Monument al llit, a four-pillared statue, headed by death in one corner and a pregnant woman in another. Down the way, where the trees are thicker, a collection of older stone pieces, part of the ‘Camins d’aigua’ series, showcase Cabanyes’s integration of his art with nature. The carved abstracts are blended into the landscape by a greenish lichen coating their bases, and are designed to catch and filter rainwater with striking optical effects, through a series of intricate channels.
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