Jaume Plensa: Beyond Silence, opening at GRAY Chicago on September 17, marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together monumental carved-wood reliefs, dramatically vertical sculptures in cast iron and granite, and intimate bronze works, Beyond Silence examines two long-standing central tenets of his practice—scale and material. Unified thematically in their representation of the figure, the artist explores the possibility and continuity of our shared human experience.

At the center of the exhibition are two monumental relief sculptures in carved wood, Beyond Silence (Julia) and Beyond Silence (Maria), each measuring twenty-eight feet in length. The works engage directly with the architecture of the space, spanning the gallery much like the wooden trusses that define the interior. Their monumental scale transforms the human figure into an architectural presence, collapsing the distinction between sculpture and the built environment. 

Installed alongside the reliefs are three sculptures from a new series, Clouds, each measuring seven feet in height. Combining cast iron with granite, the works bring together materials of contrasting texture and appearance. The industrial character of the cast iron is set against the smooth surface of granite, producing an unexpected sense of suspension and weightlessness.

The center of the exhibition holds bronze sculptures from the Twilight series, each approximately twenty inches high. The smaller scale of the bronzes shifts the encounter from the architectural to the personal, inviting a more intimate viewer experience. 

The exhibition opens at GRAY Chicago with a public reception from 6-8 PM on September 17, 2026, and remains on view through December 19, 2026. 

ABOUT JAUME PLENSA

JAUME PLENSA (b. 1955, Barcelona, Spain) is a leading contemporary sculptor internationally renowned for his large-scale public installations. For more than forty years, the artist has created meditative sculptures, drawings, and environments that make manifest a sense of spirituality and an atmosphere of introspection. Working across materials as varied as stone, steel, glass, wood, light, water, video, language, and sound, Plensa’s practice invites viewers to ruminate on their fundamental relations to space, to silence, to beauty, and to a shared humanity.

Plensa’s first solo exhibition at GRAY was presented in the gallery’s Chicago location in 1996. Since then his practice has been the subject of more than a dozen monographic and group exhibitions at the gallery’s spaces in Chicago and New York. Plensa’s work has featured in major exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 2024, and in permanent commissions like Water’s Soul along the Hudson River, Utopia at Frederik Meijer Gardens, and Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Today, Plensa’s sculptures for public space can be viewed in cities across the world, including Singapore, Seoul, Dubai, Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Bangkok, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, and Nice.

Solo museum exhibitions of Plensa’s works have been presented at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, England; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Musée Picasso, Antibes, France; Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil; Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, Netherlands; and at the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany, among many others.

The artist’s work is held in dozens of institutional collections around the world, and he has received numerous national and international awards, including honorary doctorates from Notre Dame University and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, as well as the Velazquez Prize awarded by the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Plensa lives and works in Barcelona.