Jaume Plensa: Remote, Serene, Ethereal, co-presented by GRAY and Galerie Lelong, will open at GRAY New York on September 23. The exhibition features three elongated portraits in painted bronze surrounded by a suite of site-specific wall drawings by the artist.

The titles of the three portraits—Remote (Yolandita), Serene (Ita), and Ethereal (Martina)— express an enduring tension in Plensa’s work, the space between the universal and the individual. While the foundational images in his portrait works come from specific figures from his community in Barcelona, the forms pull away from those individualities and move toward a more universal collective when elongated and monumentally scaled. At over two meters tall each, the sculpture installation offers a space of stillness and contemplation through which the viewer can pass.

Alongside, and as a counterpart to, his sculptural practice, Plensa has long pursued a method of drawing that is site-specific, immediate, and spontaneous. Drawn directly on the wall, Plensa’s charcoal portraits expand freely, responding to the architecture of each unique environment. The mural-sized drawings in Remote, Serene, Ethereal offer a two-dimensional echo of the three-dimensional sculptures, surrounding them in space.

The gallery show follows Plensa’s celebrated career survey A New Humanism, which opened at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, MI, and traveled to the Denver Botanic Gardens, and is concurrent to his solo show Invisible at the Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg, Germany.

Jaume Plensa: Remote, Serene, Ethereal opens at GRAY New York with a public reception for the artist from 6-8 PM on September 23 and will remain 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 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.