My wife and I are proud supporters of the Denver Botanical Gardens; depending on our budget, we often rotate our memberships between the gardens and the Denver Museum, along with other educational and art-focused venues. Call us nerds, but these venues make great places for a date night/day.
This trip, there was an art exhibition displayed in various spots throughout the garden.
The Exhibition: Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism
This is the first U.S. retrospective of Plensa’s work, organized in partnership with Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It runs at the Denver Botanical Garden April 18 – September 7, 2026, and explores his career-long engagement with themes of personal introspection and collective harmony.
The Artist
Based in Barcelona, Plensa is best known for Crown Fountain, the immense portrait fountains in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Throughout his 40-year career, he has worked in materials ranging from steel and bronze to resin, graphite, and ink, with work in major collections including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
What’s on View
The centerpiece is hard to miss: a pair of large-scale human heads sculpted from steel wire, “Julia and Lou, ” roughly 12 feet high and 12 feet deep, facing one another above the Monet Pond as if in silent conversation. The sculpture changes perspective as you walk around the pond.
Indoors, Talking Continents is a 19-piece installation of stainless steel figures whose bodies are composed of die-cut characters from eight different alphabets: Arabic, Japanese, Greek, and others. They are welded together and floating atop cloud-like forms. I, of course, inspected the welds and can testify that they are of good quality.
This is a museum placard for a Jaume Plensa exhibit called “A New Humanism.” Here’s the gist:
In the Plains garden their are four bronze sculptures: Wilsis, Laura Asia, Carlota, and Julia (all subtitled “Oak”)
Plensa started with oak tree trunks he found in France, carved faces into them, then cast them in bronze. He’s said that discovering those oak trunks in France sparked his idea to find the hidden portrait each one concealed.
The concept for the four pieces depicts young women with closed eyes, evoking dreaming, thinking, or meditating. Together forming a scene of quiet contemplation. The oak trunks themselves have their own “faces” made up of bark patterns, knots, and splits, thus mirroring the individuality of the carved human features. By grounding these introspective figures in tree material, Plensa is making a point about how people are inseparably part of the natural world.
The full show presents 28 artworks, including large drawings on paper with graphite and ink. This is part of Denver Botanic Gardens’ 75th anniversary celebration. It’s a genuinely significant show and worth the trip if you haven’t been out to the gardens this summer. The combination of the outdoor sculptures integrated into the garden landscape and the indoor gallery work gives you a solid impression of what Plensa has been doing across four decades.
If you are looking for a furniture artist who appreciates and is inspired by other artists’ works, you know where to find me.
I’m the owner of Benham Design Concepts, a Colorado-based Custom Furniture design and fabrication studio. I design and build custom furniture that resembles works of art, using materials such as wood, glass, stone, and metals. The furniture I produce serves not only as practical items but also as works of art, infusing character and style into any space.
