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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

Yoshitomo Nara

Audio guide

Audio guide map

Opening Talk nara

Fundación BBVA

A Lonely Place

Searching for What Was Missing

After the Quake

Thinking in Silence

Dialogues with Tradition

Drawing the Lines and Advocating Peace

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His work is widely recognized for its bold, cartoon-like images of children with large heads and big, engaging eyes—at times menacing, challenging, and defiant, or else melancholic, and uncertain, but, over the years, increasingly calm and meditative. Nara was not immediately accepted in the art world, but his pioneering, graphic style is now well established.
Nara’s characters—his figures, animals, and hybrid beings—are a representation of himself. They provide a visual expression of his innermost thoughts and emotions and convey the depth of his humanism. The sources of Nara’s creativity are his deeply-etched memories of childhood; his knowledge of music and literature; Japanese and European art history, fostered by his boundless curiosity; and his empathetic and galvanizing encounters with people and cultures through his travels in Japan and abroad.
Nara has a long-standing love of folk, rock, and underground punk music and is renowned for his free-spirited attitude. His engagement with humanity and society is profound, and, with strongly-held views on the world we share, his work examines and incorporates ideas surrounding concepts of home, community, nature, and the environment, and their interconnectedness.
Born in 1959 in suburban Hirosaki, in northern Japan, Nara went on to study painting at the University of the Arts in Aichi. In the late 1980s, he moved to Germany to attend the prestigious Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He would remain in Germany for twelve years and during this time he continued to develop his unique pictorial language. In 2000 Nara returned to Japan, where he continues to live and work today. His art relates directly to his own history and lived experiences. At its core are the lasting memories from his childhood in Japan—predominantly his feelings of loneliness—and from his time spent abroad, with the familiar sense of isolation he knew in Germany, where he did not speak the language.
This retrospective exhibition is not displayed chronologically. Nara has purposefully planned it to present his works within themes that communicate their underlying personal and emotional foundations. His intention is to reveal who he is as an artist and the ideas that interest him and are central to his creative process: his recurring motifs, his evolving formal approach, and his varied techniques.
This exhibition takes us on a journey through the intriguing “World of Nara,” presenting work made over the last four decades. Nara’s imagery is original and enduring. It demonstrates the continuity of memory he has sustained throughout his career and serves to highlight his stylistic development. First and foremost, Nara views himself as a painter, but he explores each theme within a range of other mediums and formats—drawing, sculpture, and installation.
Gallery: 105 
Curator: Lucía Agirre 
Venues: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden; Hayward Gallery-Southbank Centre, London
 
Yoshitomo Nara 
In the Deepest Puddle II, 1995 
Acrylic on cotton mounted on canvas 
120 x 110 cm 
Takahashi Collection 
© Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Yoshitomo Nara Foundation

Childhood

Overseas

Return to Japan

Great East Japan Earthquake

In the Museum

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

START

VIRTUAL TOUR

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His work is widely recognized for its bold, cartoon-like images of children with

Yoshitomo Nara | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Anthony McCall: Split Second

Opening Talk

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Museum’s program devoted to artistic practices of the moving image, the Film &amp; Video Gallery will host the radically abstract, film-based work of Anthony McCall (b. 1946, St. Paul's Cray, UK). Characteristic and always enigmatic, the work of this British-born, New York-based artist characteristically generates sculptural phenomena by means of cinematic projections, though it can also be perceived from the perspective of drawing expanded in space or light art.
Since in the 1970s up to the present day, McCall has produced his installations around the idea of “solid light,” a concept referring to the volume effects generated by the controlled projection of planes of light in the exhibition space, producing shapes that hypnotically and intangibly move throughout the darkness of the gallery. In clear dialogue with the works of Richard Serra and Lucio Fontana in the Museum Collection, this exhibition will feature the premier of a single new work, titled Split Second (Mirror) IV (2024), alongside the historic projection piece Miniature in Black and White (1972) and a series of photographic prints.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
Anthony McCall 
Face to Face, 2018 
Exhibition view at the Hepworth Wakefield, United Kingdom, 2018 
Photo: Darren O’Brien/Guzelian Pictures. Courtesy the artist

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Museum’s program devoted to artistic practices of the moving image, the Film &amp; Video Gallery will host the

Anthony McCall: Split Second | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

“We can learn a lot from nature, plants, and animals if we look carefully. For instance, we can become aware of the time it takes for living beings to develop and grow&#8230;”
Elssie Ansareo

Artists

Elssie Ansareo

“La Arboleda is a place where one’s presence and interaction with the environment can be felt differently&#8230;&#8221;

Ibon Garagarza

“What an amazing time we have had this year! The students and teachers’ involvement set the project’s pace&#8230;&#8221;

Zaloa Ipiña

“Exploring the intersection between the history of art and food was the backbone of our art project this year&#8230;&#8221;

Nerea Lekuona

“My work as an educator and my activity as an artist sometimes overlap. Educational art projects are a fine way of exploring my art interests and concerns in a different light&#8230;&#8221;

Maider López

&#8220;This project drew on art-specific concepts and methods, like symbolism, abstraction, or metaphor, to take a different look at the world&#8230;&#8221;

Manu Muniategi

Learning Through Art

10 students, 5th and 6th grade, Escolapios Calasanz School, Vitoria-Gasteiz

Art You Can Eat

16 students, 1st to 6th grade, La Arboleda School, Trápaga

Traces of the Past and the Future

21 students, 2nd grade, Artatse School, Bilbao

Landscapes That Come to Life

21 students, 2nd grade, Eretza Berri School, Sodupe

Nature in Transformation

17 students, 5th and 6th grade, Manuela Zubizarreta School, Etxebarria

Taking Care of the Vegetable Garden

13 students, 6th grade, Katalin Erauso School, Donostia-San Sebastián

What We Have in Common

Learning Through Art is an educational program that uses a unique method, resorting to art as a tool to deal with elementary school curriculum content. During the 2023–2024 school year, six Museum artists embarked on this creative adventure with schoolchildren from six different schools, working with them along twenty sessions. Their art projects addressed topics such as the importance of healthy eating habits, the search for connections between people, or the development of fresh looks at nature and the environment. The children used video, painting, photography, and sculpture to explore and understand reality, and to develop collaboration skills, creativity, and imagination. They were encouraged to get involved in their own creative processes, to think, assess, make choices, try, have doubts, have fun, get lost, and, of course, make mistakes—for there can be no progress without mistakes.
Learning Through Art culminates in a presentation of the school projects at the Museum. This year, the processes and changes in the natural world, local identity, common good and individuality, and the importance of care were some of the subjects that inspired the schoolchildren’s work. Outside the gallery, a video shows the creative process throughout the school year, summarizing the path taken by each school group.
The exhibition of the schoolchildren’s projects at the Museum is the program’s closure, showing the work done over several months. At the exhibition, visitors can find unexpected, original, fresh points of view, explore inspiring ideas, and share in the children’s excitement about discovery and creation. The Museum’s Art Program often invites reflection on the environment. Thus, the exhibition Learning Through Art is in line with the Museum’s sustainability goal regarding the materials used and the subjects of many of the topics presented.

Exchange Project

IN THE MUSEUM

Video about The Exhibition

Learning Through Art is an educational program that uses a unique method, resorting to art as a tool to deal with elementary school curriculum content.

Learning Through Art | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Martha Jungwirth

Interview to the artist and to the curator

Occident

205. Objects and People

206. Travel Escapes

207. Animals as Imagery

209. Art History

Martha Jungwirth (b. 1940, Vienna) has likened her artworks to a diary that traces her physical engagement with the creative process. She sees her drawings and paintings as dynamic extensions of herself, where intelligent structures of lines and blotches emerge, propelled by her emotions and movements. Jungwirth’s art is a study in fluidity, transparency, and openness, shunning the pursuit of the noble to delve into the raw, the uncensored, and the unembellished.
Jungwirth's work exists in a conversational realm between memory and representation, translating personal experiences into visual forms that are deeply individual perceptions. Through colors that carry emotional weight and gestural forms that only hint at their origins, Jungwirth’s paintings defy easy categorization, oscillating between abstraction and subtle representational elements. This artistic spectrum ranges from paintings filled with dense strokes to those marked by spare brushwork, exploring the tension between abstraction and the physical world.
Jungwirth’s early work demonstrates a distinct approach to the visceral and the subjective characterized by a fusion of Abstract Expressionism and a raw, emotive quality, setting the stage for the development of her unique aesthetic. Her oeuvre is marked by a continuous evolution, engaging with a variety of themes, from introspective self-portraits to landscapes to responses to contemporary global events, such as the 2019–20 Australian bushfires.
This exhibition presents 70 works, starting with Jungwirth’s earliest drawings that explore the boundary between representation and abstraction, and concludes with her recent series inspired by Francisco de Goya and Édouard Manet. Organized thematically, it features drawings, watercolors, oil paintings, and artist books on a variety of substrates, including handmade paper, accounting books, cardboard, and more. These unconventional materials introduce unpredictability into Jungwirth’s creative process, enhancing the spontaneity and dynamism of her work. Her dedication to thematic exploration and visual innovation highlights her distinctive stance in the art world, as she persistently challenges and extends the limits of her artistic expression.
Galleries: 205, 206, 207 and 209 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Martha Jungwirth 
Maja I, from the series Francisco de Goya, Maja 
(Maja I, aus der Serie Francisco de Goya, Maja), 2021 
Oil on paper over canvas 
238.8 x 299.6 cm x 2.7 cm 
Brauner Collection 
© Martha Jungwirth, Bilbao, 2024 
Photo: Sebastiano Pellion

Martha Jungwirth, gesture and color

After the great masters

In the study of Jungwirth in Viena

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

Martha Jungwirth (b. 1940, Vienna) has likened her artworks to a diary that traces her physical engagement with the creative process. She sees her

Martha Jungwirth | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Pop Art from the Guggenheim Collection 

Signs and Objects. Pop Art from the Guggenheim Collection

Guided visit

BBK_new

203 Gallery

202 Gallery

208 Gallery

Originating in England in the late 1950s, the Pop art movement took hold in the United States after receiving support from critics such as British writer and curator Lawrence Alloway, who coined the term “Pop art” in 1958. Alloway also organized the seminal 1963 Guggenheim exhibition Six Painters and the Object, which introduced the movement to the American public. He had initially considered titling the exhibition Signs and Objects, a phrase chosen for this presentation of works from the Guggenheim collections.
Encouraged by the economic vitality and burgeoning consumerist society of post–World War II America, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol explored the visual language of popular culture—the term from which the art movement derives its name—taking inspiration from advertisements, pulp magazines, newspapers, billboards, movies, comic strips, and shop windows. The cool detachment and harsh, impersonal look of Pop art signaled a direct assault on the hallowed traditions of so-called high art and its emphasis on the personal gesture, or free-flowing brushwork, which had been championed by Abstract Expressionists of the previous generation, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The works in this exhibition, presented with—and sometimes transformed by—humor, wit, and irony, may be read as both an unabashed celebration and a scathing critique of popular culture.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 204 and 208 
Curators: Lauren Hinkson and Joan Young
 
Roy Lichtenstein 
Grrrrrrrrrrr!!, 1965 
Oil and Magna on canvas 
172.7 x 142.5 cm 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 
Gift of the artist, 1997 
Photo © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. All Rights Reserved.

Signs and objects

Cardboard life cycle

Pop Artworks

We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition SIGNS AND OBJECTS. POP ART FROM THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

Originating in England in the late 1950s, the Pop art movement took hold in the United States after receiving support from critics such as British writer

Signs and Objects. Pop Art from the Guggenheim Collection | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

3nd floor

3rd floor

This presentation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection includes a selection of works that mark crucial moments in art history following World War II. In an ambitious gesture to underscore the resonance between art and architecture, this installation, which features some of the Collection’s most outstanding pieces, also showcases the original architecture of the building. The installation celebrates of the diaphanous and luminous spaces of the third floor of the Museum.
This exhibition is inspired both by the Museum’s holdings of singular works by artists and by historical artistic movements that are well represented in the Collection. The presentation thus highlights figures who belonged to the avant-garde of their time and whose contributions chartered new courses in post-war art history. Each gallery offers the chance to view the production of a single artist or a selection of artists who explore shared concerns from different perspectives.
Some spaces on this floor show site-specific installations or single pieces of an experiential character, like those dedicated to Sol LeWitt and El Anatsui. The work by the latter, Rising Sea, is a contemporary sculpture of great importance by the African artist, and is the latest acquisition to join the Collection. Other galleries house thematic selections on the development of abstract art after World War II, or on approaches between abstraction and spirituality, or deal with later artistic languages that developed between 1960 and 1980, such as Pop Art and the presence of popular culture in contemporary art. The displays furthermore include historic documentation on these artistic trends and the artists who contributed to them. Cette
Galleries: third floor 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller

If Walls Could Talk…

El Anatsui

Jenny Holzer

Jeff Koons

Sol Lewitt

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

This presentation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection includes a selection of works that mark crucial moments in art history following World War

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Iberdrola

When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (b. 1862; d. 1944) began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, they were like little that had been seen before: bold, colorful, and untethered from any recognizable references to the physical world. It was years before others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private. She rarely exhibited them and, convinced the world was not yet ready to understand her work, stipulated that it not be shown for twenty years following her death.
Ultimately, her work was all but unseen until 1986, and only over the subsequent three decades have her paintings and works on paper begun to receive serious attention. This survey of Hilma af Klint’s will offer an unprecedented opportunity to experience her long-underrecognized artistic achievements, especially her breakthrough years, 1906–20, when she first began to produce nonobjective and stunningly imaginative paintings, creating a singular body of work that invites a reevaluation of modernism and its development
Gallery: Second floor 
Curators: Tracey R. Bashkoff y Lucía Agirre
 
Hilma af Klint 
Group VI, Evolution, No. 16, The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series 
(Grupp VI, Evolutionen, nr 16, Serie WUS/Sjustjärnan), 1908 
Oil on canvas 
102 x 133 cm 
The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm HaK 84

Hilma af Klint

When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (b. 1862; d. 1944) began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, they were like little that had been seen

Hilma af Klint | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Surveying twenty-five years of the multi-disciplinary practice of Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom will celebrate a pioneering artist known for his incisive work that interrogates ideas of spectacle, belonging and difference. Inspired by televised sporting events and popular entertainment, Pfeiffer’s work deconstructs our fascination and obsession with celebrity culture, unpacking how collective consciousness is shaped and manipulated through his masterful editing of found footage. In tracing the global trajectory of image circulation, Pfeiffer demonstrates how desire, heroism and worship operate as part of the mechanisms of art, religion, politics, and nationhood.
From era-defining early videos to recent, genre-breaking works in photography, installation, and sculpture, the exhibition establishes Pfeiffer as one of today's most influential artists. His signature works on LCD monitors and miniature projectors, including Fragments of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999), John 3:16 (2000), and The Long Count (2000–01) trilogy, are joined by large-scale projections and immersive installations, such as The Saints (2007), an audio-visual recreation of the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany and Red Green Blue (2022), the artist’s most recent video work. This exhibition also marks the debut of newly-commissioned sculptures in Pfeiffer’s ongoing Incarnator series made in collaboration with “encarnadores” (from the Latin word meaning ‘“to make into flesh”), sculptors working in the Philippines, Spain and Mexico. Here, Pfeiffer casts the popstar Justin Bieber in the likeness of Jesus Christ, transforming him into a religious icon. The production of these sculptures links sixteenth-century colonial trade routes to present day global networks.
This is the artist’s first U.S. retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presentation will be the artist’s largest European survey.
Galleries: 103 and 105 
Venues: MOCA, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
 
Paul Pfeiffer 
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07), 2002 
Digital duraflex print 
121.9 x 152.4 cm 
© Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Perrotin; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

Surveying twenty-five years of the multi-disciplinary practice of Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

18€ Adults - 9€ Senior - 9€ Students

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Exhibitions

Yoshitomo Nara

06.28.2024 - 11.03.2024

Anthony McCall: Split Second

06.19.2024 - 11.10.2024

Learning Through Art

06.17.2024 - 09.15.2024

Martha Jungwirth

06.07.2024 - 09.22.2024

Signs and Objects. Pop Art from the Guggenheim Collection

02.16.2024 - 09.15.2024

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

01.24.2023 - 12.31.2024

Exhibitions

upcoming

Hilma af Klint

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

Exhibitionspast

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