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Exhibitions

Consult everything you need to know about current and upcoming exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Exhibitions | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Arts of the Earth

Opening Talk

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Iberdrola_

Gallery 205

Gallery 206

Gallery 207

Gallery 209

Gallery 201 and 203

Gallery 202

The exhibition Arts of the Earth proposes a reinterpretation of the transformations undergone by artistic practices in recent decades, taking into account the context of an increasingly evident and overwhelming environmental crisis. Tracing out a diverse cartography across multiple disciplines, Arts of the Earth aims to present a potential inventory of tools, prototypes, and hypotheses. Rather than being “prescriptive” by dictating what should be done, thought, or felt, they hold a documentary stance displaying signs of the shift that, over the last 60 years at least, has affected aesthetic production in terms of both the materials used and awareness of them. This transformation is evidenced by a number of historical works that have been partially or fully reconstructed, recreated, or reactivated, as well as contemporary pieces that, rather than seeking to last forever, pave the way for a circular economy of art. Their existence thus hinges on preserving the ecosystems from which they originate and to which they will return.
In recent years, artists from different generations and different cultures have pondered how to work with the earth when care and repair is most needed; how to appreciate and repay it for its gifts; and how to learn from what it brings us when it seems stripped of its natural wealth. The constructive potential of soil and its components extends far beyond classic formulations of sculpture, architecture, design, and landscaping. In a concrete, familiar, and dynamic sense, soil is the scene of incessant communication and exchange, of essential synergy between species that is constantly transcended for the good of the whole. In Arts of the Earth, artworks, projects, documents, and objects of ancestral wisdom are joined by a type of museography that makes use of new, locally sourced compostable or recycled materials and an innovative approach to exhibition logistics. This approach reaffirms and expands upon the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s commitment to sustainability.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
Giuseppe Penone 
Nail and Laurel Leaves (Unghia e foglie di alloro), 1989 
Glass and laurel leaves 
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery 
Photo: Alex Yudzon

The substrate of Art

Emblems of diversity

Ancestral practices

Works that return to the ecosystem

Healing the ecosystem

Living, renewable works

Video about The Exhibition

In the Museum

We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

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VIRTUAL TOUR

The exhibition Arts of the Earth proposes a reinterpretation of the transformations undergone by artistic practices in recent decades, taking into account

Arts of the Earth | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Mark Leckey

And the City Stood in Its Brightness is the second exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s in situ series, a program that invites artists to create site-specific works in dialogue with the gallery’s architecture. Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) imagines the intersections of popular culture, technology, and collective memory, recontextualizing historical imagery to spark dialogue between past and present. His work reflects on nostalgia and class, probing how media and technology shape our sense of identity and belonging.
Growing up near Liverpool during the late 1970s and 1980s, Leckey came of age amid the collapse of Britain’s industrial heartlands and the social rifts that followed. Factories closed, communities fractured, and mass culture—broadcast through television and advertising—became a new kind of landscape. This atmosphere of upheaval and mediation shaped his fascination with how images, sounds, and technologies construct shared imagination and belonging.
For this exhibition, Leckey takes inspiration from Sassetta’s City by the Sea (1424), among the earliest cityscapes in Western art where the city itself becomes the subject. The painting depicts a fortified medieval city on a hillside, rendered in a geometrically complex yet flattened plane. Leckey observes: “The city transcends the laws of physics; it is of the past and of the future.” His interpretation moves from two-dimensional image to sculptural form, inhabiting the threshold between material reality and the immaterial realm—the real and the imaginary.
In the installation, the sculpture becomes part of an imagined story whose temporal rhythm is defined by a six-minute loop of sound and light composed by the artist. The ambient soundtrack—built from layered fragments of found audio, music, and occasional voices—unfolds like a drifting current, punctuated by sudden intrusions of speech or melody. Its progression is mirrored in a shifting cycle of light that moves from the break of day until twilight. At the midpoint, an intense strobe coincides with the soundtrack’s crescendo, briefly flooding the gallery in an almost blinding glare. Projected directly onto the sculpture, the lighting animates its surfaces and transforms it from a solid object into a flickering apparition. Together, these immaterial elements—sound and light—structure the work’s narrative arc and atmosphere, enveloping viewers in a charged, temporal space that oscillates between revelation and erasure.
The installation envisions how physical space, sound, and light converge with intangible forces—digital systems, or transcendental experience—to evoke transformation and instability. By intertwining material and immaterial elements, Leckey creates a space where the visible and the invisible collide, offering an encounter that is at once immediate, uncanny, and transcendent.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman
Mark Leckey 
Installation view, And the City Stood in Its Brightness (2025) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Process Behind in situ: Mark Leckey

Music Engagement

in situ: Mark Leckey. And the City Stood in its Brightness

And the City Stood in Its Brightness is the second exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s in situ series, a program that invites artists to create

in situ: Mark Leckey. And the City Stood in its Brightness | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

Gallery 305. Abstraction and Space

Gallery 306. Gesture and Action

Gallery 307. Art and Language

Gallery 304. El Anatsui

Gallery 301. Yayoi Kusama

Gallery 302. Art and Conflict

Gallery 303. Echoes of Pop Art

With this new exhibition, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents a recent extension of its holdings including new acquisitions, gifts from The D.Daskalopoulos Collection and the Al Held Foundation, as well as the long-term loan of around fifty pieces from the Inge Rodenstock Collection. These additions strengthen the representation of key art figures and movements from the second half of the 20th century, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Antoni Tàpies, Cy Twombly, or Andy Warhol, while they also expand the Collection’s narrative lines by introducing different styles and names, like Hanne Darboven, Al Held, Damien Hirst, Martin Kippenberger, and Robert Ryman, among others. These works represent an extraordinary contribution to the institution and enable to highlight unique connections between artists, movements, and eras.
With the exception of galleries 301 and 304, each of which is devoted to a single artist—Yayoi Kusama and El Anatsui, respectively—all the other spaces are conceived as independent choral presentations that foster multiple interpretations and novel dialogues among the pieces in the Collection. This strategy enhances the Museum’s commitment to creating a dynamic, plural narrative that reflects the richness and complexity of contemporary art and that contributes to the investigation and dissemination of art history from the 1950s to the present day.
The exhibition has been conceived to respect the original design of Frank Gehry’s building, so that the architecture becomes an essential, active part of the artistic experience.
Curator: Marta Blàvia
Andy Warhol 
One Hundred and Fifty Multicolored Marilyns, 1979 
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas 
201 x 1.055 x 6 cm 
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Collections in Dialogue

Private Collecting

Guggenheim Bilbao Collection

Corporate Collecting

<div class="content Content_content__Ox13L VirtualVisit_virtualVisitContentContent__NRWfr">We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show. </div>

start

With this new exhibition, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents a recent extension of its holdings including new acquisitions, gifts from The

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

“An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special”. —Ruth Asawa
Unfolding across ten sections that span the arc of a sixdecade- long career, this exhibition traces the full breadth and depth of the innovative practice of an iconic artist. Ruth Aiko Asawa (b. 1926, Norwalk, California, USA; d. 2013, San Francisco, USA) integrated her creative work with all aspects of her life as an artist, educator and arts advocate. This interconnectedness is illuminated in photographs and ephemera presented alongside and in response to the works featured here, from the suspended looped-wire sculptures for which she is best known to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints. Challenging distinctions between abstraction and representation, figure and ground, and negative and positive space, her work invites us to contemplate how disparate elements interact in a composition, which in turn engages with its surroundings.
Asawa was the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant farmers. During World War II, she and her family were forcibly incarcerated by the United States government because of their Japanese ancestry. In 1946, after being denied an art teaching degree because of anti Japanese prejudice, she enrolled at the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the school’s democratic environment, she forged a creative path grounded in experimentation and an ethos of hard, continuous work. From her time at Black Mountain through the end of her life in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949, Asawa situated her artistic practice within set parameters to investigate ideas of transparency, continuity, and space. In the 1960s, she also expanded her life’s work to directly engage her community through public commissions, arts education, and civic advocacy.
Taking its cue from the artist’s multifaceted work, this retrospective charts Asawa’s career and legacy, highlighting her ceaseless experimentation with material and form evident in her radical innovations.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
The exhibition is co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, in collaboration with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
International exhibition tour supported by The Henry Luce Foundation
Galleries: 103, 105 
Curators: Janet Bishop, Cara Manes, with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães 
Venues: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
Ruth Asawa 
Artist Ruth Asawa making wire sculptures, California, United States, November 1954; 
artwork: © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., Courtesy David Zwirner; 
image: Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock 
© Ruth Asawa, Bilbao 2026

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

“An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special”. —Ruth Asawa Unfolding across ten sections that span the arc of a

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interweaves the personal and the political through materials, gesture, and form. Drawing inspiration from his childhood in Bonteheuwel—a community marked by the divisions of Apartheid Adams transforms humble materials, such as rope, beads, and wire into complex compositions exploring the interconnections between race, religion, sexuality, and memory. He often takes as starting point of his practice the patterned linoleum floors of domestic interiors and translates those familiar geometries into abstractions that condense both intimacy and uprootedness.
Adams has recently expanded his research to encompass, to a greater extent, the realm of movement. His collaboration with Garage Dance Ensemble in O’okiep, in South Africa’s Northern Cape province—the ancestral home of his mother’s family—has opened a new dialogue between weaving and dance. Through workshops with dancers, Adams devised a process in which the bodies move across canvases placed over the painted linoleum floors, creating “dance traces” that record collective gestures of liberation and connection. These traces, superimposed throughout successive performances, function as visual scores of the encounter: traces of the attempts to “release accumulated and sedimented psychic imprints,” as the artist himself described them.
The pieces that will be presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao originated from performances held in Athens in 2024, whose monotypes have been transformed into a number of large-scale woven tapestries, suspended in space to allow the viewer to move around and between them. Some hang from hooks that curve the piece outward, revealing both sides of the tapestry; others are accompanied by small woven “clouds,” as if they were fragments of color and movement which had broken free and were floating in the air. At once playful and solemn, Adams’s installation gives shape to invisible forces—memory, rhythm, empathy—and proposes the act of weaving as a bodily, communal practice of healing.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman
Igshaan Adams 
Within Grid Lines, 2025 
Cotton twine; polyester braided and polypropylene rope; plastic, wooden, 
glass, stone and metal beads; cotton and silk fabric; mohair wool; 
cotton lace; silk ribbon; silver chain; and tiger tail wire 
495 x 587 cm 
Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and blank projects 
© Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects

in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interweaves the personal and the political through materials, gesture, and

in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Fundación BBVA

Jasper Johns: Night Driver looks back at the career of this renowned American artist, considered one of the most prominent figures in post-war art. With around a hundred works from public and private collections around the world, the starting point of this retrospective show will be his iconic paintings of flags, targets, letters, numbers, and maps from the 1950s that made the leap away from Abstract Expressionism. In the 1960s, Johns moved from the impersonality of his early works to others in which he expressed a new mood of restrained yet intense emotions, reflecting a sense of melancholy and inner turmoil. By the end of that decade, Johns was seen by many as a key figure in the emergence and development of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, three analytical and self-reflective movements, much like Johns's own work.
The exhibition continues with works created during the 1970s and 1980s, including abstract images constructed with intersecting lines; pieces filled with visual references or citations of other artists from different periods; the series on the four seasons; as well as the group of creations in which he represented the face of a woman with eyes, nose, and lips gravitating towards the edge of a rectangular field. The exhibition concludes with a selection of pieces made in the 1990s and 2000s, in which the artist revisited some of his iconic themes while exploring new ideas, as in the Catenary series.
Jasper Johns: Night Driver will span seven decades of Johns’s long and prolific career, an artist who not only revitalized the American art scene of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but also served as a source of inspiration for his contemporaries and for new generations of younger artists with very different aesthetic tendencies.
Gallery: 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curator: Enrique Juncosa
Jasper Johns 
0 through 9, 1961 
Oil paint on canvas 
1372 × 1048 mm 
Tate. Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1961 
T00454 
© Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2025

Jasper Johns: Night Driver

Jasper Johns: Night Driver looks back at the career of this renowned American artist, considered one of the most prominent figures in post-war art. With

Jasper Johns: Night Driver | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland), one of the most renowned video artists in the past three decades, began to earn fame in the 1980s when she brought the aesthetic of the videoclip to media art, along with other influences like popular culture, technology, and historical feminist videoart. She developed her own heavily sensorial and emotional style very early on.
This exhibition presents the two channel video installation Ever is Over All (1997), which shows a smiling woman wearing a light blue dress who breaks car windows as she walks along the sidewalk. This sequence is superimposed and even merged with other dreamlike images featuring different tropical flowers. Accompanied by a compelling, slowed-down soundtrack composed by Anders Guggisberg, the video offers a poetic atmosphere that immerses the viewer in a kind of magical realism where a flower becomes a destructive weapon, giving rise to a cathartic, hopeful gesture.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Mikel Onandia
Pipilotti Rist 
Ever is Over All, 1997, audio video installation by Pipilotti Rist (video still) 
Courtesy the artist, Hauser &amp; Wirth, and Luhring Augustine 
© Pipilotti Rist, VEGAP, Bilbao 2025

Ever is Over All. Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland), one of the most renowned video artists in the past three decades, began to earn fame in the 1980s when she

Ever is Over All. Pipilotti Rist | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Occident

The artist, filmmaker and screenwriter Steve McQueen (b. 1969), based in London and Amsterdam, explores personal and collective themes through moving images. Recognized for his ability to distil complex emotions into precise and minimalist narratives, McQueen has stated that he wants to "put the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves, to their body and respiration." The physical conditions of vision—the scale of projection, sound, light, and the relationship between the viewer and the space—are as fundamental to his work as the environment itself, giving his practice a distinctly sculptural quality.
Galleries: 105 
Curator: Lekha Hileman
Steve McQueen 
Bass, 2024 
LED light and sound 
Courtesy the artist 
Co-commissioned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, and Dia Art Foundation 
June 15–November 16, 2025, Schaulager® Münchenstein/Basel (Installation view) 
Photo: Pati Grabowicz, © Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen

The artist, filmmaker and screenwriter Steve McQueen (b. 1969), based in London and Amsterdam, explores personal and collective themes through moving

Steve McQueen | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Iberdrola

For more than thirty years, Dan Flavin (b. 1933, New York; d. 1996, New York) devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, and other conventions of display. His embrace of the unadorned fluorescent fixture as an aesthetic object aligned him with a generation of artists whose use of industrial materials, emphasis on elementary forms, and nonhierarchical relationships among component parts became the salient characteristics of Minimalism.
In 1963, Flavin started to make artwork with ordinary fluorescent lights. In his words, “electric light is just another instrument”. His was an important departure from the traditional conventions that would come to define his art for the rest of his life. Although subject to limitations in the use of color and to the standard size of fluorescent lights, Flavin soon developed his own architecturally dynamic vocabulary of “corners,” “monuments,” “barriers,” and “corridors.” With his use of a widely available plain industrial material, his attention to the circumstance of the observer, and his emphasis on elementary forms, Flavin was soon considered a key figure of Minimalism.
One of the shows of the Museum’s Art Program with works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s holdings, Dan Flavin will feature relevant pieces created by the artist from the 1960s through the 1980s, with a special focus on his early pieces
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curator: Lauren Hinkson
Dan Flavin 
greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966 
Green fluorescent light 
Two sections: first section: 4 feet (122 cm) high x 20 feet (610 cm) wide; 
second section: 2 feet (61 cm) high x 22 feet (670 cm) wide 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection, 1991. 91.3705 
© Stephen Flavin, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2025

Dan Flavin

For more than thirty years, Dan Flavin (b. 1933, New York; d. 1996, New York) devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by

Dan Flavin | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Zadie Xa (b. 1983, Vancouver) is an artist of Korean-Canadian descent who works in London. Her multidisciplinary practice explores issues like identity, folklore, and the transmission of the cultural heritage of the diaspora through storytelling, performance, and immersive installation. Based on Korean mythology, shamanistic ritual, science fiction, and her own experiences, Xa builds multisensory environments in which charlatans and hybrid beings disrupt the prevailing historical account. Her recent solo exhibitions at venues like the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Space K in Seoul, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris showcase the artist’s interest in interspecies communication, symbols of protection and transformation, and the spiritual importance of territory and place. Through painting, textile, sculpture, sound, and performance, Xa merges the construction of fantastical worlds with political and metaphysical inquiry.
Xa’s work has been shown at major international institutions, like MoMA PS1, Palais of Tokyo, Haus der Kunst, and the Venice Biennale, where she participated in the 2019 performance program. Several of her notable collaborations with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo have even further expanded her inquiry around costumes, masks, and the archetype of the charlatan. In 2025, Xa was a finalist for the Turner Prize, one of the most prestigious contemporary art awards in the United Kingdom, for her collaborative installation presented at the 16th Sharjah Biennial, Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything. Through affective forms and multiple layers, Xa builds a space where ancestral knowledge, speculative fiction, and cultural recovery converge.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman
Zadie Xa 
Scorpion 2021, Oct 29, 2021. Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo. 
Curated by Priyesh Mistry. 
The National Gallery, London. Supported by Canada Council for the Arts. 
Photo by Andrew Bruce

in situ: Zadie Xa

Zadie Xa (b. 1983, Vancouver) is an artist of Korean-Canadian descent who works in London. Her multidisciplinary practice explores issues like identity,

in situ: Zadie Xa | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

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As part of this initiative, the Museum hosts activities from a variety of fields, including architecture, film, dance, design, gastronomy, music, performance art, and theater.

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Exhibitions

Arts of the Earth

12.05.2025 - 05.03.2026

in situ: Mark Leckey. And the City Stood in its Brightness

11.14.2025 - 04.12.2026

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

11.07.2025 - 12.31.2026

Exhibitions

upcoming

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive

Jasper Johns: Night Driver

Ever is Over All. Pipilotti Rist

Steve McQueen

Dan Flavin

in situ: Zadie Xa

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