GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.- Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism explores Jaume Plensa’s career-long engagement with themes common to our shared humanity such as dreams, desire, justice and mortality. While Plensa’s oeuvre is marked by diversity in format and media, the human condition remains the primary subject of his art, which traverses the personal and collective, individual and universal. Featuring both monumental and intimate-scaled sculptures and select two-dimensional works that span four decades, this is the first retrospective of this internationally acclaimed artist in the United States.

The art of Jaume Plensa has almost become synonymous with Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, after the 2021 opening of his marble Utopia in the Garden Pavillion at the heart of our Welcome Center. The defining qualities of that sublime installation—a focus on the human form; unity of distinct individuals; hushed and introverted tone—recur in many of the Plensa’s other works over of the past four decades. The exhibition Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism, the artist’s first career retrospective to be held in the United States, surveys both the continuity and the diversity in Plensa’s oeuvre.

Although Plensa’s work is marked by a great variety of format and media—encompassing monumental and intimate-scaled sculpture, and including works in stone, wood, metal, video, and sound—humankind remains the prime subject of his art. Plensa’s exploration of the human condition traverses the personal and collective, individual and universal. A New Humanism reveals the artist’s ongoing engagement with issues related to our common humanity. Through a selection of sculptures spanning four decades, along with related works on paper, the exhibition spotlights this crucial dimension of his visionary art.

Plensa’s creative quest is fueled by a highly inquisitive mind, and one of his prime assertions is, “Sculpture is the best way to ask questions.” The questions he poses within his sculpture center on what it means to be human. As such, the artist also partakes of the grand humanist tradition, which holds the interests and values of humanity at its core.

Using his own body as the departure point in early work, Plensa’s initial probes into the human experience literally drew on his own blood, sweat and tears. Grounded in his anatomy, Plensa’s art has increasingly expanded outward to embrace the fleshy geography that we all inhabit. Geographic and architectural metaphors infuse much of the artist’s work and convey his understanding of our separate-yet-united state. His art at once recognizes the sanctity of the individual while extolling our interconnectedness, a duality potently expressed in his 2013 Talking Continents installation, which manifests the artist’s concept of human beauty: “What’s beautiful is to be as one, while keeping our differences.”

Our vast interiority is evoked in Plensa’s various sculpted heads rendered with eyes closed. Turned inward, they commune with themselves in a domain inhabited by personal desire. For Plensa, “the architecture of our bodies is the palace for our dreams,” rather than a prison or trap. This view echoes that of Romantic poet and painter William Blake, whose words often grace Plensa’s art, notably in this Silhouettes series of 2011-12. Dreams and the imagination are ever present throughout the artist’s creative career, and the words “rêve” and “dream” repeatedly appear in titles of his works and publications.

While Plensa extols the individual’s internal realm, he ultimately sees inner journeys as a route toward civil unity. To know the far regions of ourselves, is to comprehend the capacities of other people. With one eye set on the personal sphere, and the other fixed on social affairs, Plensa’s art points to a worldly promise land built on private soil. In this regard, his Utopia is a hymn to both individual strength and collective harmony. It can also be read as a testament to the value and beauty of people across the globe.

A consideration of Plensa’s art within a humanist context gains sharper focus in light of his 2020 piece, Forgotten Dreams, which features cast-aluminum doors inscribed with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the United Nations in 1948, these tenets assert common rights for all the world’s citizens to live with freedom, equality and dignity. With Forgotten Dreams, as with his many other works that beckon our potential, Jaume Plensa breathes new life into humanism and into the human experience.