“When we dream, anything is possible.”

Jaume Plensa

Jaume Plensa (b. 1955, Spain)

Jaume Plensa is one of the world’s leading sculptors and public artists. The list

of his permanent site-specific commissions is long and impressive, with notable

projects such as Crown Fountain at Millennium Park, the laser beam of

Gateshead’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and Breathing, commissioned

by the United Nations as a memorial for journalists killed while working on

assignment.

Plensa regularly shows his work at galleries and museums in Europe, the United

States, and Asia. The landmark exhibitions in his career include one organized at

the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 1996, which travelled to the Galerie

nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö (Sweden)

the following year. In Germany, several museums have staged exhibitions of his

work. These include Love Sounds at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover in

1999 and the recent The Secret Heart, which was shown at three museums in

the city of Augsburg in 2014.

A very significant part of Plensa’s work is in the field of sculpture in the public

space. Installed in cities in Spain, France, Japan, England, Korea, Germany,

Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, these pieces have won many prizes

and citations, including the Mash Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture, which

the artist received in London in 2009 for his work Dream. The Crown Fountain,

which was unveiled in Chicago’s Millennium Park in 2004, is one of Plensa’s

largest projects and, without doubt, one of the most brilliant. The work led to

many commissions, adding to the list of works by Jaume Plensa in public spaces,

right up to the most recent, Roots (2014), installed in the Toranomon district in

Tokyo.