Jaume Plensa is a jet-setting Barcelonian who thinks big.

It’s pretty common for outdoor sculpture to be big as a way to compete with all of the other big things outside – trees, building, crowds, tall people – but Plensa does it in a way that is completely original to the outdoor art scene. He lets the piece dictate the material he uses to create it. In the past this has included stainless steel, marble, polyester resin, LED lights, sound, fiberglass, and marble dust. This is impressive because often when artists work on a large scale they stick to just one medium that they use over and over and over again (lookin’ at you Richard Serra). Not to say it is a bad thing to work with one material, but it just makes it so that everyone wants a piece of Jaume Plensa who keeps it exciting. He has artworks all around the world. Dubai, Des Moines, Tokyo, Salzburg, you name it. Plensa is part human, part pinball with how much he bounces around the world.

Born in 1955 in Barcelona, Plensa began his artistic career at the Llotja School of Art and Design and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. He had his first exhibition there in 1980, but from that point on he was a man of the world. Much like his art, Plensa has lived (and worked) all over the world including Berlin, Brussels, England, France and the United States. He has taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But this nomadic existence did not work with his love life. He married a woman by the name of Laura Medina, who manages his studio in Barcelona, where he now lives permanently.