Oriol Bohigas dusted it off from a municipal warehouse and gave it a second life in Sants. We are talking about the modern Venus statue, which was part of the set of sculptures that populated the grounds of the 1929 International Exhibition. At the end of the event, it was dismantled, put away and forgotten. After decades collecting dust, since the 1980s it can be admired again in the Espanya Industrial park.
It was commissioned by the sculptor José Pérez Pérez, known by the pseudonym Peresejo, who created a Venus that professor Anna Maria Guasch has defined as having a “Mediterraneanist” tendency, with a “more Renaissance than Greek orientation,” distancing herself from the Noucentista model that “ “I looked to antiquity as a source of inspiration.” It was surely because of its “Mediterraneanist” aesthetic, Guasch reasons, that Bohigas, in the 1980s, Barcelona’s Urban Planning delegate, decided to recover it for the Espanya Industrial park.
In 1929, the modern Venus was installed at the entrance to the Danish pavilion, on a parterre between the two columns that entered the Scandinavian venue from International Avenue (current Estadi Avenue). Once the exhibition was over, it was removed to spend more than 50 years in a warehouse. It was of no use to be the pasture of beauty and love.
The Danish pavilion whose path was pointed out by the Venus of Peresejo stood out for being a very austere construction designed by the architect Tyge Hvass. It reproduced a traditional Scandinavian house, with a rectangular wooden plan, with a gabled roof with dark red tiles. The rest was a lighter reddish. Above the access door, a sheaf of corn, an anchor, a toothed wheel, an oak branch and a barrel stood out, which represented the economic progress of the country.
Most of the pavilions were demolished once the exhibition ended, but the one in Denmark lasted a few years, until 1936, when it was finally eliminated. The chronicles of the time say that one of the attractions of the Danish performance that aroused the greatest curiosity among visitors was a life-size porcelain doll dressed in typical clothing of the country and which was baptized Miss Mette. She came to Barcelona at the initiative of the Copenhagen newspaper Politik.
