Born in 1955 in Barcelona, where he studied at the Llotja School of Art and Design and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts.

Since 1980, the year of his first exhibition in Barcelona, he has lived and worked in Berlin, Brussels, England, France and the United States, currently resides and works in Barcelona.

Plensa regularly shows his work at galleries and museums in Europe, the United States and Asia. The landmark exhibitions in his career include the one organized at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 1996, which travelled to the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö (Sweden) the following year. In Germany, several museums have staged exhibitions of his work. These include Love Sounds at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover in 1999, The Secret Heart, which was shown at three museums in the city of Augsburg in 2014 and Die Innere Sight at the Max Ernst Museum, in Brühl in 2016. During 2015 and 2016 the exhibition Human Landscape has travelled through several North American museums: Cheekwood Estate and Gardens and The Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN, the Tampa Museum of Art in Tampa, FL and the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, OH. His latest Museum exhibitions have been in 2017 at the MAMC Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Saint-Étienne Métropole, France and Talking Continents at the MMoCA Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI, USA. In 2011, a large selection of Plensa’s sculptures has been exhibited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, England.

Jaume Plensa’s work can be seen regularly at the Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris and New York, and the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and New York.