Jaume Plensa at Richard Gray Gallery

Richard Gray Gallery announces two exhibitions of works by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa: “Secret Garden” located at Gray Warehouse, and “One Thought Fills Immensity” at the Gallery’s Hancock space.

Secret Garden

• At Gray Warehouse, 2044 West Carroll Ave, Chicago, IL 60612.
• Secret Garden expands upon Plensa’s long-time study of portraiture, presenting a new body of work in wood, stainless steel, bronze, and alabaster, and a suite of works on paper. This exhibition marks the international debut of a series of large portraits rendered in stainless steel—a first for the artist. Secret Garden posits the mind and body as spaces of great potential. For Plensa, silence is an essential component for contemplation and the activation of this potential. In his ruminations on silence, Plensa questions the efficacy of verbal communication and asks his viewers to seek growth and potential from within.

One Thought Fills Immensity

• At Richard Gray Gallery, 875 North Michigan Ave, 38th Floor, Chicago, IL 60611.
• The pursuit of self-knowledge is a central concept in Plensa’s studio practice. One Thought Fills Immensity borrows its title from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, 1790. As an avid reader of literature, Plensa finds inspiration in the work of poets like José Ángel Valente, William Blake, and Elias Canetti. On Blake, the artist states “’One thought fills immensity [is] a marvelous concept in which our ideas are expanding out [and] filling up the space, not with physical objects, but with energy.” The pursuit of a heightened awareness and inquiry is articulated across Plensa’s oeuvre. One Thought Fills Immensity features important early works such as Firenze II (1992), the first work in which Plensa took the concept of the question as a point of departure.

About Jaume Plensa

Jaume Plensa (b.1955, Barcelona, Spain) is one of the world’s foremost sculptors with international exhibitions and over thirty public projects spanning the globe in such cities as Chicago, Dubai, London, Liverpool, Montreal, Nice, San Diego, Tokyo, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Plensa’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, including: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2000); The Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids (2008); Musée Picasso, Antibes (2010); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2010); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton (2011); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki (2012); Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art, Nashville (2015); Max Ernst Museum Brühl, Germany (2016); and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Métropole (2017).

Select public installations include: Crown Fountain (Chicago, 2004); Echo (Seattle, 2014); Wonderland (Calgary, 2013); Breathing (London, 2008); Roots (Tokyo, 2014); and Source (Montreal, 2017). Pacific Soul (San Diego) and Dreaming (Toronto) will be installed in the fall of 2017.

Plensa will be the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona in the fall of 2018.

The two exhibitions open with a public reception for the artist at Gray Warehouse on Thursday, September 14 from 6 to 8 pm. A Q&A with Jaume Plensa and curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport will take place at Gray Warehouse on Friday, September 15 at 10:30 am.