Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism

Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism brings the Spanish sculptor's first U.S. retrospective to the Denver Botanic Gardens, pairing large-scale outdoor work among the York Street grounds with two- and three-dimensional pieces in the indoor Freyer-Newman Center galleries. On view April 18 through September 7, the show gathers Plensa's serene portrait heads and text-based figures around his lifelong themes of shared humanity. Plensa, 70 and based in Barcelona, is among the most widely sited public sculptors working today, known for Chicago's Crown Fountain in Millennium Park. Outdoors, a series of monumental faces of women, originally carved from oak and cast in bronze with the grain and bark still visible, sit with eyes closed in meditative calm. Indoors, the 2013 work Talking Continents fills a room with hanging steel figures assembled from letters drawn from the world's alphabets. The Botanic Gardens has built a reputation for ambitious summer art, having shown Dale Chihuly, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore and Deborah Butterfield among its flora. The Plensa retrospective scales that tradition toward an accessible meditation on what people across cultures hold in common.