Born in Barcelona in 1955, he trained at the Llotja School of Art and Design and the Sant Jordi Faculty 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, and currently resides and works in Barcelona.

He has been a professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and regularly collaborates with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a visiting professor; he has also given lectures and courses at universities, museums, and cultural institutions worldwide.

He has received several awards, including the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1993), the National Award for Plastic Arts from the Generalitat de Catalunya (1997), an Honorary Doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), the National Award for Plastic Arts of Spain (2012), and the Velázquez Award for the Arts (2013), as well as honorary doctorates from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2018) and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (2024).

He exhibits regularly in Europe, the United States, and Asia, with notable shows at the Fundació Joan Miró (1996) and touring to Paris and Malmö (1997), as well as exhibitions in Germany (1999, 2014, 2016), and the North American tour of Human Landscape (2015–2016). Also included are Chaque visage est un lieu (Céret, 2022), Poesia del silenci (Barcelona, 2023) and La part du sacré (Mons, 2023), in addition to Chaos-Saliva (Madrid, 2000) and the recognition for Behind The Walls (New York, 2019), later presented in Mexico City (2020) and Ann Arbor.

An essential part of his work is sculpture in public spaces, with projects such as Crown Fountain (Chicago, 2004) and recent works like Water’s Soul (2020), Utopia (2021), Constellations (2022), Endless (2023) and The House of Light and Love (2024). Among other distinctions, he received the Marsh Award (2009) for Dream and the Global Fine Art Award (2015) for Together. He has also promoted graphic work (retrospectives in Caen and La Louvière, 2006; National Engraving Award, 2013) and, since 1996, has collaborated in theatre and opera; in 2023, at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, he took on the stage direction and the design of scenography and costumes for Verdi’s Macbeth . As an author of bibliophile books, his notable works include Plensa/Estellés · L’Hotel París and Plensa·Macbeth·Verdi, both with Enciclopèdia Art.