The Personal Miraculous Fountain

Jaume Plensa

An acclaimed creator of public art, Jaume Plensa produces monumental sculptures in steel, glass, marble, polyester resin, concrete, and bronze. He is best known for his Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millenium Park, two 50-foot-high glass towers set amidst a pool of water, which play giant video portraits of Chicago residents that periodically purse their lips and spout water into the pool. Predominantly producing figurative sculpture, Plensa has created larger-than-life-sized heads constructed of fine, stainless-steel wire mesh so that their surrounding environments are visible through the works, and bronze figures cast from his own body. “Sculpture is not only talking about volumes,” he has said. “It is talking about something deep inside ourselves that without sculpture we cannot describe. We are always with one foot in normal life and one foot in the most amazing abstraction.” Plensa has also taken on more abstract subject matter; Breathing (2005), a glass, steel, and light installation commissioned for the BBC in London, projects a beam of light some 3000 feet into the sky every evening to honor journalists who have lost their lives.