The MACBA exhibition will feature works from the 1980s to the present, in a journey showing the dialogue that takes place between works that represent the human figure and those that are abstract. This tension is the thread that runs through the whole of his work, a corpus that highlights the strength of binomials such as weightlessness/compactness, light/dark, silence/sound, spirit/matter and life/death.

In Talking Continents, a floating archipelago of 19 cloud-like shapes, by Jaume Plensa will be exhibited at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. 

The Arthur Ross Gallery is proud to announce that Jaume
Plensa, Spanish artist and sculptor, will present the second
annual Susan T. Marx Distinguished Lecture on April 18, 2018.

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art presents Jaume Plensa: Talking Continents. The exhibition features a collection of suspended steel forms and is on view in the museum's State Street Gallery through April 15th.

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to present a live musical performance at Gray Warehouse, hosted by conductor Robert Nordling and performed by collaborating violist Michael Hall and mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen. The performance will take place amidst the current exhibition Jaume Plensa: Secret Garden.

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce two exhibitions of work by Jaume Plensa. Located at Gray Warehouse, Secret Garden presents recent sculptures in wood, stainless steel, and bronze, in conjunction with a suite of drawings. The exhibition continues at Richard Gray Gallery’s Hancock space with a portrait series carved in alabaster. A second exhibition of historical works titled One Thought Fills Immensity is also on view at the Hancock, featuring works from 1989 to 2002. Through November 11.

In the central hall of the Museum, two large faces in steel mesh face each other, massive and light, present and transparent. Realized directly on a wall on a large scale, a head drawn and fuzzy, with melted contours and blurred vision, seems to be diluted in space. Finally, five portraits of girls in cast iron more than 4 meters high rub shoulders without looking at each other. These are emblematic of the recent work of Jaume Plensa.

Die Innere Sicht, which surveys Jaume Plensa's work of the past two decades, opens at the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany, on September 4, 2016 and runs through January 15, 2017.

Jaume Plensa: Human Landscape, a survey of Jaume Plensa's work in outdoor sculpture, drawing, and etching, opens at the Toledo Museum of Art June 17 and runs through November 6, 2016. The exhibition was organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jaume Plensa's Anna, a fourteen-meter tall polyester resin with marble dust sculpture, was unveiled at the Pilane Heritage Museum in Klövedal, Sweden. 

Jaume Plensa at Palau de la Música Orfeó Catalá in Barcelona runs through May 16, 2016.

Hall 3, Booth E6. Presenting work by: Richard Artschwager, Louise Bourgeois, José de Rivera, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Alex Katz, David Klamen, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, and Leon Polk Smith and John Stezaker. 

Jaume Plensa was interviewed in designboom in a conversation that touches on his use of text, the origins of his large scale sculptures, and the collaborations that feed into his practice. Read more at designboom.com.

Jaume Plensa's Human Landscape is the largest exhibition Plensa's outdoor sculptures in the United States to date. It was organized and debuted at the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art and the Frist Museum in Nashville in the summer of 2015, and will be on exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art through May 24, 2016.

Jaume Plensa has been named winner of a 2015 Global Fine Art Award in the "Best Public or Outdoor Installation" category for his Venice Biennale exhibition Together. His fellow finalists included Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Palace of Versailles and Chicharu Shiota's Japanese Pavilion, also for the Biennale.

Jaume Plensa, Matrix and Multiple opens today at the Museo Casa de la Moneda in Madrid, featuring an overview of recent prints and sculptures by the Barcelona-based artist.

Surrealism: The Conjured Life takes a Chicago lens to international Surrealism, bringing together over 100 works, both historical and contemporary. 

Jaume Plensa is the subject of the most recent Brilliant Ideas, a video series produced by Bloomberg news that examines "the most exciting and acclaimed artists at work in the world today." In the 24 minute video, Plensa discusses his working process and the ideas that propel his work. Watch the video here.

Jaume Plensa: The Silence of Thought is an exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de Céret that consists of three large scale installations by the Catalan artist. The exhibition runs through November 15, 2015.

In an exhibition spanning two venues, the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Jaume Plensa has opened his largest exhibition to date in the United States. The artist spoke with the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean about the show, stating "It will be a very rich show for me. It's a terrific opportunity for people to see my work on many different levels." The exhibitions encompass the artist's well-known monumentally scaled portrait sculptures, as well as a selection of more modestly sized outdoor sculptures and also works on paper. The exhibitions have staggered opening dates, with Cheekwood opening Friday May 22 and the Frist opening June 5.

Jaume Plensa's installation Together in the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore and the Officina dell'Arte Spirituale, Venice, has been noted by Christie's Art World News as one of the Best of the Biennale. The artist has also been profiled in Newsweek Europe, Designboom, and Quartz, with a favorable mention in the Guardian's Venice Biennale review.

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Millennium Park opens a special exhibition of work by Jaume Plensa, the world-renowned sculptor and creator of one of the Park’s most prominent attractions, the Crown Fountain. “Jaume Plensa: 1004 Portraits” features four large-scale portraits of young girls positioned in the park such that they complement and expand upon the story of the 1000 LED portraits of Chicago residents that illuminate the Crown Fountain. The exhibition opens to the public on June 18 and runs through December 2015.

Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda, stands at the entrance to Millennium Park (Madison Street at Michigan Avenue); its surreal and majestic presence bridging the frenetic energy and distractions of city life with the tranquility of the park. Magnificent in scale, Awilda’s beauty, power, and serenity encourages people to stop and join the moment of quiet contemplation. In the tree-lined outdoor South Boeing Gallery, located behind the Crown Fountain, three new cast iron heads Laura, Paula, and Ines are exhibited. Despite their great materiality, the sculptures appear like a hologram, with shifting perspectives and illusion rendering the work in perpetual visual motion. Plensa’s serene portraits provide a peaceful counterbalance to the children’s boisterous play in the Crown Fountain.

“These four portraits are each individually awe-inspiring but in this configuration also perfectly extend the powerful grandeur of Mr. Plensa’s Crown Fountain into the surrounding areas of Millennium Park,” said Donna La Pietra, chair of the Millennium Park Foundation. “We are tremendously grateful to Mr. Plensa for allowing Chicago to host these pieces; we can think of no better way to celebrate our 10th anniversary than by hosting such an impressive array of works by one of the artists whose contributions to Millennium Park have made it a model for public spaces world-wide.”

The exhibition is co-presented by Millennium Park Foundation with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and is sponsored by The Boeing Company, with support from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

The Seattle Art Museum recently welcomed Jaume Plensa's Echo to the Olympic Sculpture Park. The 46 foot sculpture was a gift to the museum from the collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, and was originally commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservatory in New York, and was installed in the park previously in 2011.

"Echo will be a spectacular and iconic new addition to the park and Seattle’s waterfront," said Kimerly Rorschach, the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director of SAM. "This is an incredible gift to the city from Barney Ebsworth and Echo will become a beacon for the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the park each year."

"Many times we talk and talk," Plensa stated previously for an interview with the New York Times, "but we are not sure if we are talking with our own words or repeating just messages that are in the air. My intention is to offer something so beautiful that people have an immediate reaction, so that they think, ‘What’s happening?’ And then maybe they can listen a little bit to themselves."

Jaume Plensa will give a lecture on his extensive body of artwork in public spaces at the Art Institute of Chicago on June 16th. The event is free and open to the public. The lecture is organized in conjunction with Plensa’s exhibition of outdoor sculpture in Millennium Park 1004 Portraits, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Park. Four monumental sculptures will be installed near the Crown Fountain opening June 17, 2014 and running through the fall of 2015.

The Tony Cragg Foundation presents a solo exhibition by Jaume Plensa on view at Skulpturenpark-Waldfrieden in Wuppertal, Germany from April 12-June 22, 2014. For the exhibition, Plensa has focused on one particular gestalt in his expanding family of work—the kneeling figure on a boulder. 

Richard Gray Gallery is delighted to announce that Jaume Plensa has won the 2013 Velazquez Prize, awarded by the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Established in 2002, the prize is given to a Spanish artist for reinventing the visual language of sculpture. The jury noted in its decision "the coherence of Plensa's career in which he has thoroughly reinvented the language of sculpture, integrating poetry and conceptualization in designs of great aesthetic intensity." Plensa received two other major prizes this past year including Spain's National Graphic Arts Prize (2013) and the National Visual Arts Prize (2012).

Barcelona based conceptual artist Jaume Plensa has produced a rich body of work over the past 30 years and is best known in Chicago for the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park. Plensa discusses his practice and engages in a dialogue with moderator Reed Kroloff, Director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum, about art and architecture.

The Architecture Is Art talks series examines the intersections and blurred boundaries between the professional practice and creative process of architects and contemporary artists. The series explores how architects and artists identify their work, where they turn for inspiration, how their process and presentation materials are interpreted, and when it is useful or necessary to distinguish the disciplines of art and architecture for viewers.

Presented in collaboration with Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art

Time: 6:00 pm
Cost: $8 CAF & MCA members / $10 non-members / $6 students
Location: MCA Theater, 220 E Chicago Ave

Register by calling the MCA Box Office at 312-397-4010 or buy tickets online.
For further information, please visit the MCA's website.

For Frieze Sculpture Park 2013, celebrated artist Jaume Plensa will present Chloe, a seven-meter tall sculpture in the center of London’s Regent’s Park. Continuing Plensa’s tradition of re-imagining and re-presenting the human figure, Chloe’s presence encourages the viewer to enter a state of serenity and contemplation. In a return to a favored medium from early in Plensa’s career, Chloe is formed in cast iron, creating a contemporary sculpture with a timeless aesthetic, which has become a hallmark of Plensa’s unique practice.

At the end of May, Jaume Plensa presented Rui-Rui in the heart of Venice for the exhibition Glasstress: White Light/White Heat, a collateral event during the 55th Venice Biennale. In June, eleven sculptures were installed throughout the public spaces of Bordeaux, France for the exhibition Jaume Plensa in Bordeaux. Plensa has also been active in England in recent years – in 2007 he created Dream, a twenty-meter tall sculpture installed in St. Helens near Liverpool, and in 2011 the Yorkshire Sculpture Park held a widely acclaimed exhibition by the artist. Jaume Plensa. Talking Continents will open on November 1st at Galerie Lelong, NY, and will run through December 14.

Jaume Plensa will have a major solo exhibition in Bordeaux, France opening on June 27 and remaining on view until October 6. There will be an opening reception on June 27th at 6pm; the artist will be present.

Over a dozen sculptures will be exhibited at several outdoor sites throughout the city. Artworks will include two new sculptures made in cast iron that stand 21 feet tall, the monumental icon House of Knowledge, and several new works continuing Plensa's exploration of the human figure created through language and symbols. An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition will be published.

Rui Rui, a seven meter sculpture by Jaume Plensa, will stand at the crossroads of Accademia and San Marco as part of the exhibition Glasstress: White Light / White Heat. Glasstress is curated by Adriano Berengo and James Putnam and coincides with the 55th Venice Biennale. Plensa’s Rui Rui will be premiered at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti from June 1 - November 24, 2013. There will be a vernissage on May 31 at 6pm, the public is welcome and the artist will be in attendance.

Rui Rui (2013) will be installed in the garden of Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti on the north side of the Accademia bridge. Though fabricated in cast iron, the sculpture appears like a hologram, fugitive despite its great materiality. The sculpture continues Plensa’s focus on the human figure, specifically the head, a subject he explores in awe-inspiring scale such as the majestic Echo (2011, Madison Square Park, New York) and Dream (2009, St. Helens, Liverpool, U.K.). Rui Rui is captured in silent meditation, her eyes closed in a dream. The sculpture invites a similar moment of quiet contemplation for all who encounter the work, as they pass through Venice’s labyrinthine canals and streets.

Jaume Plensa’s monumental Wonderland has been unveiled in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in the front plaza of Foster + Partner’s skyscraper THE BOW. Standing twelve meters tall, Wonderland is Plensa’s largest work to date created from bent-wire mesh. Encana Corporation and Cenovus Energy commissioned the sculpture.

Wonderland is the portrait of a young girl who lives in the artist’s native Barcelona. Depicting only her head, the portrait represents humanity as well as our human potential created and fostered by our dreams. The transparent mesh creates a visual bridge between Wonderland and THE BOW as Plensa strives to link together art, architecture and society. Contrary to its commanding size, the sculpture’s transparency creates an ethereal sense of fragility, mirroring and celebrating the fragility of human beings. People are encouraged to enter the sculpture through openings on either side of the head, an invitation for visitors to physically experience Plensa’s metaphor of the mind being the sanctuary for dreams.

A solo exhibition by Jaume Plensa "In the Midst of Dreams" continues at EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art) in Helsinki, Finland through January 27, 2013. The artist will give a lecture at EMMA on January 22. During the darkest time of the year in Helsinki, Plensa created an exhibition centered around the theme of light. Over forty artworks are on view created from steel, synthetic resin, glass, iron, bronze, alabaster, paper and light. An illustrated catalogue with essays by Carsten Ahrens, Pilvi Kalhama, and Jaume Plensa is available

Barcelona-based conceptual artist Jaume Plensa has been awarded the 2012 National Visual Arts Award of Spain, organized by the Ministry of Culture. The award recognizes artists whose work represents outstanding and innovative contributions to the Spanish Cultural Heritage.

Richard Gray Gallery, in partnership with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), is pleased to announce People vs. Space, a student exhibition that is the culmination of an intensive summer course led by Jaume Plensa, world-renowned Spanish sculptor and creator of the Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The exhibition opens Friday, July 6 and runs through July 20, 2012. The artworks on view in People vs. Space were conceived and created by 11 SAIC undergraduate and graduate students, as well as two visiting international students. Throughout People vs. Space, students worked directly with Plensa to develop project proposals for public works integrating contemporary media with the core concerns of objects, spaces, communities, and interactions. This exhibition features the detailed models and proposals developed by class members.

For the purpose of the class, Plensa asked the students to concentrate on the roles of both the artwork and the artist in public spaces and how they are understood in contemporary contexts. Students were encouraged to explore the multiple ways in which artists can create new kinds of connections between people and space, art and society, and art institutions and communities.

Plensa is the current William and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Established in 2006 by a generous gift from William and Stephanie Sick, this distinguished professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC. People vs. Space is the second course taught by Plensa at SAIC that has culminated in an exhibition through Richard Gray Gallery. This summer, Plensa’s co-teachers are SAIC faculty members John Manning and Bo Rodda (SAIC MFA 2010). “We are proud to recognize the contributions that Jaume Plensa has made to the cultural landscape of the city of Chicago, and we are thrilled that SAIC students have the opportunity to use their talents to work with Plensa on proposals for major new public art works in our great city,” stated William and Stephanie Sick.

A lecture by Jaume Plensa focusing on several significant public works of art, starting with the Crown Fountain.

Awilda and Chloe peacefully preside over the newly redesigned lobby of the Grand Hyatt New York. With softened features and closed eyes, the iridescent white marble sculptures exist in a dreamlike state, encouraging the rushed world around them to pause and perhaps join in the dream. Plensa states, "Awilda, Chloe is a metaphor for the diversity and similarity of all people; people just trying to be happy where they are, when they are there".

Jaume Plensa's largest museum exhibition to-date at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, UK, open though January 22, 2012.