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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

Barbara Kruger

Opening Talk

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Occident

Gallery 205

Gallery 206

Gallery 207

Gallery 209

Gallery 203

Gallery 202

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the first comprehensive survey in Spain of American artist Barbara Kruger, whose bold, thought-provoking work has captivated audiences for over five decades. This expansive exhibition explores how Kruger harnesses the power of words and images to question the structures that shape our daily lives—identity, desire, truth, and control.
From the very beginning of her career, Kruger has challenged how language functions in the media, in politics, and in our own inner dialogues. Using concise, declarative phrases set in stark black and white text punctuated by either red or green, she draws from the visual language of advertising—but instead of selling products, her works demand critical thinking. Phrases like “Your body is a battleground” or “I shop therefore I am” have become cultural touchstones, raising urgent questions about gender, consumption, and power.
This exhibition brings together works from across her career—early paste-ups, large-scale vinyl texts, video installations, audio interventions, and site-specific pieces created especially for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. As one moves through the galleries, Kruger’s art unfolds across floors, walls, and screens, immersing visitors in a charged visual and sonic environment. Her work is not just something to look at—it is something to experience, to question, and to confront.
In dialogue with Bilbao’s own linguistic and cultural histories, Kruger has created work in Spanish and Basque that explores how language defines who we are and how we live together. As she puts it, “Language is a powerful force—and it defines us.”
At a time when information is constant and truth feels increasingly unstable, Kruger’s work encourages us to slow down, read closely, and think deeply. With wit, urgency, and visual precision, she reminds us that images speak—and so must we.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Barbara Kruger 
Untitled (Forever), 2017/2025. Digital print on vinyl wallpaper and floor covering. Installation view, Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, June 24–November 9, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers

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Video about The Exhibition

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

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VIRTUAL TOUR

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the first comprehensive survey in Spain of American artist Barbara Kruger, whose bold, thought-provoking work has

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

This year, I would like to focus on the opportunities that can be found in schools in small towns.

The Artists

Ibon Garagarza

This year, we resorted to trial and error, and experimentation in art to understand the impact of habitual human actions on nature.

Zaloa Ipiña

The children in this group were enthusiastic and willing to participate. We could see how art can be a tool for social activism.

Nerea Lekuona

By keeping an observant attitude, we kept track of changes in the weather. When it was windy, we opened the windows and listened to the howling wind, trying to mimic it.

Maider López

The program allowed me to work with a group of schoolchildren who showed me they were able to do a lot of work. It has been such a rewarding experience, highlighting the importance of identity and belonging.

Manu Muniategiandikoetxea

This project centered on the animal world and the relationship between humans and nature. The art project brought together creativity, imagination, and environmental awareness

Ibon Sáenz de Olazagoitia

Learning Through Art 

C.P. Juan Ramón Jiménez LHI, Cruces (Barakaldo)

Maps for a Better World

C.P. Zeberio LHI, Zeberio 

Where do we come from? Where are we going?

C.P. Arrateko Andra Mari LHI, Eibar

Art and Identity

CPI Juan Zaragueta IPI, Orio

As Many Skies as There Are Days

C.P. Lamuza LHI, Laudio/Llodio

Camouflage and Mimicry in Nature

C.P. Alonsotegi LHI, Alonsotegi

Embracing Nature

This exhibition presents the work done by more than one hundred children, aged 6 to 12, during the 2024/2025 school year in the context of Learning through Art, an educational program of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. This initiative brings artists to the classroom, where they work with teachers in projects designed to incorporate art into the school curriculum.
Through artistic exploration and discussion, the schoolchildren deal with the contents of the elementary school subjects in creative and personal ways. The activities are designed to connect art to a variety of school areas—Natural and Social Science, Spanish/Basque, Math, and so on—as a way to explore and understand the world around the students.
This year, the projects focused on the seasons and their influence on nature; the effects of human action on the environment; how to camouflage into the natural world around us. They also learned about creation and activism and their possible impact on society, and the work of local artists. Through art and self-knowledge activities they also reflected on identity, at both the personal and the collective levels.
In their processes, the students resorted to a wide variety of disciplines and mediums—painting, sculpture, photography, and performance, among others. All the projects encouraged freedom of expression and emphasized the importance of creativity in education.

The School Exchange

Learning through art 2025

This exhibition presents the work done by more than one hundred children, aged 6 to 12, during the 2024/2025 school year in the context of Learning

Learning through art 2025 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules

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Fundación BBVA

Making Her Mark: 1950s

Riding the Tide: 1960s

Newfound Freedom: 1970s

Thresholds: 1980s

In Pursuit of Beauty: 1990s

Painting to Finish: 2000s

Among Friends

Invited to Make Sculpture

Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928; d. 2011), best known for her invention of the soak-stain technique, played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. A tireless experimenter over the course of six decades, the artist produced a prolific stream of paintings on canvas and paper, in addition to sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and print editions. Her innovative work, represented in the collections of major museums worldwide, continues to inspire contemporary artists.
Born in New York City, Frankenthaler studied studio art with Paul Feeley at Bennington College, in Vermont, before returning to Manhattan, where she gravitated to abstract art. By the early 1950s she had gained direct access to key figures in the New York School—icons of postwar American art—all of whom shared her unwavering commitment to experimentation, some of whom became part of her inner social circle.
Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules contextualizes the painter’s creative output through the lens of her artistic affinities, influences, and friendships. Comprising thirty of Frankenthaler’s poetic abstractions created between 1953 and 2002, the exhibition also features select paintings and sculptures by some of her contemporaries—Anthony Caro, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith—highlighting the synergies between these artists.
Painting Without Rules is designed chronologically, decade to decade, beginning with the 1950s and ending in the 2000s. Each section, paced by a curatorial text, represents another chapter of Frankenthaler’s prolific career. The exhibition celebrates the legacy of a pioneering artist who never stopped exploring new ways to make abstract art.
The exhibition is organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and it is curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné.
Gallery: 105
 
Helen Frankenthaler 
Moveable Blue, 1973 
Acrylic on canvas 
177.8 x 617.8 cm 
ASOM Collection 
© 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP 
Photo: © ASOM Collection

IN FOCUS Helen Frankenthaler

Chronology

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

START

Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928; d. 2011), best known for her invention of the soak-stain technique, played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Vito Acconci / Sergio Prego: YOU

The Film &amp; Video exhibitions program at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is permanently committed to contemporary artistic practices associated with the moving image.
The point of departure for this exhibition is the collaboration and friendship that united Vito Acconci (b. 1940, New York; d. 2017) with Basque artist Sergio Prego (b. 1969, Donostia/ San Sebastián), whose artistic paths mingled in a key period of activities of the speculative design and architecture firm Acconci Studio. This exhibition proposes a subjective journey through Acconciʼs practice in video and performance using a display system designed by Prego, whose distinctive approach to sculpture deeply resonates with Acconci’s understanding of constructed spaces and the forces driving bodies in them. Their work share a specific attention to aesthetic phenomena emerging from the interplay of the senses with media and architecture, as though corporeality constantly tried to cope with shapes and norms before the lens. For both artists, artworks can operate as distinct manifestations of such tensions and paradoxes, whose impact directly affects the visitor’s physical self-awareness.
In the first part of the show, several videos by Prego play simultaneously while Acconci’s sound work Running Tape (1969) resonates in a corner of the gallery. The latter’s exercise —repeatedly counting while he ran until losing his breath, over and over—affects time, while Prego uses simple image editing hacks to present impossible positions and movements in space. Acconci’s voice can also be heard on the other side of the room, this time as the narrator of a documentary reflecting on his radical design practice. In the main space, visitors discover two large inflatable structures by Prego that operate as projection screens for select historical videos by Acconci. In his recorded performances, Acconci used the camera less as a means for self-portraiture than as a vehicle for provocation. We witness him directly pointing his finger or intimately whispering in Centers (1971) and Turn On (1974); and aggressively testing his body in Three Adaptation Studies (1970). In these works, Acconci desperately calls for attention as though he had presciently anticipated future uses of the camera in social media. More than five decades after their making, we cannot help feeling pointed at, often uncomfortably, by Acconci’s video works.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
Vito Acconci 
Three Adaptation Studies, 1970 
Film Super 8mm transferido a video (fotograma) 
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

The Film &amp; Video exhibitions program at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is permanently committed to contemporary artistic practices associated with the

Vito Acconci / Sergio Prego: YOU | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

in situ: Refik Anadol

Exhibition Partner:

1of1

Technology Partner:

Euskaltel (Anadol)

This exhibition marks the launch of in situ, a new series dedicated to site-specific installations that push the boundaries of contemporary practices. Bringing together artists whose work spans visual art, technology, music, and performance, in situ explores new ways of perceiving and inhabiting space.
in situ: Refik Anadol presents Living Architecture: Gehry, a groundbreaking audiovisual installation that reimagines Frank Gehry’s architectural legacy through artificial intelligence (AI) and generative art. Developed by Refik Anadol Studio, the custom-built AI model Large Architecture Model (LAM) is based on advanced technology and has been trained for months on a vast archive of open-access imagery, sketches, and blueprints to transform Gehry’s architectural language into ever-changing landscapes of dynamic form, color, and movement. Augmenting this visual spectacle is an immersive soundscape composed by Kerim Karaoglu, blending AI-generated audio with material recordings captured within the Museum itself.
Living Architecture: Gehry unfolds across six interconnected chapters, each representing a distinct stage in the evolution of data into architectural imagination:
<ul>
<li>Chapter I — Data Universe: A vast constellation of materials and data—archival photographs, plans, and structural documents—are compiled into a memory space.</li>
<li>Chapter II — Data Plotting: As the data is processed, complex patterns emerge through the arrangement of form, texture, and spatial composition.</li>
<li>Chapter III — Data Tunnel: The data transitions into immersive visual environments in the latent space, inviting viewers to engage with the evolving process of human-machine collaboration.</li>
<li>Chapter IV — Large Architecture Model: By transforming Gehry’s forms, the AI generates new architectural possibilities that push the boundaries of imagination and design.</li>
<li>Chapter V — Machine Hallucination: A moment of abstraction, where AI-generated structures break free from conventional spatial constraints, offering hallucinatory, dreamlike visions.</li>
<li>Chapter VI — Dreams: A return to the world of architecture, now envisioned through the limitless imagination of AI—where architecture transforms in real time, continuously generating new forms that emerge and evolve in the moment.</li>
</ul>
As the inaugural exhibition of in situ series, Living Architecture: Gehry exemplifies the way Anadol explores the future of site-specific, AI-driven art, where data becomes material and space becomes an evolving canvas of memory, form, and imagination.
Built upon ethically sourced data and powered by sustainable computing practices, the installation reflects a conscientious approach to digital creation, where innovation and responsibility go hand in hand.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Refik Anadol Studio 
Installation view of Living Architecture: Gehry at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 
© Refik Anadol, Bilbao 2025

The Process Behind Living Architecture: Gehry

This exhibition marks the launch of in situ, a new series dedicated to site-specific installations that push the boundaries of contemporary practices.

in situ: Refik Anadol | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

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, Marta Blàvia

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

Sky Hopinka came to filmmaking through his interest in Indigenous languages and storytelling techniques. A member of the Ho-Chunk nation and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, Hopinka creates intricately constructed videos that blend personal narratives with documentation of contemporary Native life and abstract imagery—all reflecting on the power and limits of intercultural communication.
A meditation on family, tradition, healing, and landscape, Hopinka’s Fainting Spells (2018) explores a mythical narrative about Xąwįska, or Indian pipe plant, used medicinally by Ho-Chunk people to revive those who have fainted. In the film, texts about the plant and its role in Ho-Chunk traditions scroll over abstracted images of gatherings, familiar terrains, and natural phenomena, many evocative of historical avant-garde cinematic aesthetics. Executed mostly in Washington and Colorado, the film exemplifies Hopinka’s ongoing efforts to create what he calls “ethnopoetic” art focused on a creative engagement with living Indigenous cultures.
For the artist, Fainting Spells is an examination of “what and how myth teaches us; how it is a presence in present-day native communities; and the way it influences how we navigate the world.” Hopinka often brings personal insights into his work, embodied here by the recordings of his father’s voice audible in the film as part of a lush instrumental soundscape.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
 
Sky Hopinka 
Fainting Spells, 2018 
Three-channel color video, with sound, 9 min., 45 sec. 
A.P. 1/2, edition of 3 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council, 2021 
© Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells

Sky Hopinka came to filmmaking through his interest in Indigenous languages and storytelling techniques. A member of the Ho-Chunk nation and a descendent

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The work from Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (b. 1908, Lisbon; d. 1992, Paris) has been seen to incorporate a variety of styles and influences, ranging from the decorative geometry of the Hispano-Arabic Azulejo tiles to the chequered tablecloths found in Pierre Bonnard’s paintings. As a result, accounts of Vieira da Silva’s work have tended to emphasize her debt to a range of existing movements and styles, rather than highlight the development of her independent artistic vocabulary. Rarely, the literature has drawn attention to the relationship between abstraction and figuration in her work, as seen in the architectural spaces she creates, which blur the distinction between real and imaginary cityscapes. This is one of a series of aspects that this exhibition seeks to highlight.
By surveying the artist’s output from the 1930s to the late 1980s, to consider Vieira da Silva’s engagement with urban architectural landscapes and the role of memory and play in her work, this exhibition will look beyond the loose formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism. Integral to this assessment is a reconsideration of Vieira da Silva’s work as independent from the gestural aesthetics of Art Informel (to which she has frequently been aligned) and an acknowledgment of her experience of Paris, understood as a distinctly transnational hub in the postwar World War II era. Likewise, attention will be drawn to the networks Vieira da Silva established during her time in Rio de Janeiro, where she escaped to with her husband Árpád Szenès at the outbreak of World War II. The exhibition will be grounded in a selection of key paintings showing Vieira’s repeated and continuously evolving deployment of abstract forms and optical illusions. These will be complemented by drawings, engravings, illustrated books and tapestries to offer a comprehensive overview of the artist’s interdisciplinary practice.
Gallery: 105 
Curator: Flavia Frigeri 
Venues: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venecia; Museo Guggenheim Bilbao
 
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908 – 1992) 
Figure de ballet, 1948 
Oil and graphite on canvas, 27 x 46 cm 
Courtesy Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris - Lisbon 
Inv. CR587

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

The work from Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (b. 1908, Lisbon; d. 1992, Paris) has been seen to incorporate a variety of styles and influences, ranging from

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Mark Leckey (b. Birkenhead, United Kingdom, 1964) is a British contemporary artist who lives and works in London. Since he came to prominence in the late 1990s, Leckey’s influential practice has addressed the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. His found object art and video pieces draw on elements of pop culture. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and UniAddDumThs; (2015-ongoing). He won the 2008 Turner Prize for his exhibition Industrial Light and Magic (2008).
Over the past six years Leckey has hosted a program on NTS Radio presenting experimental music by emerging and established artists. His presentation at the Guggenheim Bilbao will draw on the multiplicity of sources that go into his works such as sound, sculpture, and performance.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Mark Leckey 
Installation view, O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, Tate Britain, London, 24 September - 5 January 2020 
Photograph by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery London, and Tate.

in situ: Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey (b. Birkenhead, United Kingdom, 1964) is a British contemporary artist who lives and works in London. Since he came to prominence in the late

in situ: Mark Leckey | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Iberdrola

Rooted in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Environmental Sustainability Strategic Framework, the exhibition Arts of the Earth offers a reinterpretation of the environmentally inspired art of the past decades. In addition to providing a new diverse multidisciplinary map of artistic forms, this exhibition also seeks to offer an inventory of tools, possibilities, and futures. Arts of the Earth adopts our current concern for the health of our planet, and specifically for the survival of soil as moldable, living matrix, as the cornerstone of a journey through artistic expressions crossing all geographies. It is an itinerary that connects artifacts made of earth, wood, leaves, roots, and plants—ancestral mediums that have once again risen to importance today—with the earthly interventions of recent decades that have come to be known as Land Art or Earthworks, including living anti-monuments erected in remote places, at times ephemeral, the marks of which we interpret today as prophecies of the Anthropocene.
Over these past generations, artists from starkly different cultures have asked themselves how to work the earth when it most needs care and restoration; how to offer gratitude and pay tribute; how to learn from that which it offers us at a time when it appears to be being stripped of its biological, mineral, organic and chemical richness. The constructive potential of soil and the substances that compose it takes us far beyond the classic formulations of sculpture, architecture, or landscape architecture. Over the past years, many artists have experimented with the dynamics of this substrate and have combined processes of composition and composting, drawing lines and revealing the common roots of culture and agriculture; form, formation, and terraforming. In doing so, Arts of the Earth encompasses historic works from 1970 to today and includes formats such as sculpture, installations, drawing, and performance, in addition to an extensive selection of archive materials. Spanning practices that sometimes call for multiple forms of collaborative knowledge, it looks at the intersection of agronomy, botany, geology, chemistry, and biology with the arts, architecture, and design.
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

Arts of the Earth

Rooted in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Environmental Sustainability Strategic Framework, the exhibition Arts of the Earth offers a reinterpretation of

Arts of the Earth | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

18€ Adults - 9€ Senior - 9€ Students

TopARTE, an initiative of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, remains firmly committed to local cultural actors and organizations. The result of this fruitful collaboration is a multidisciplinary program offering a wide range of content and formats, reaching all kinds of audiences.
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

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night.

06.24.2025 - 11.09.2025

Learning through art 2025

06.10.2025 - 09.21.2025

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules

04.11.2025 - 09.28.2025

Vito Acconci / Sergio Prego: YOU

04.03.2025 - 09.07.2025

in situ: Refik Anadol

03.07.2025 - 10.12.2025

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

01.24.2023 - 12.31.2025

Exhibitions

upcoming

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

in situ: Mark Leckey

Arts of the Earth

Exhibitionspast

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