Past

Exhibitions

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

Exhibitions | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Oskar Kokoschka. A Rebel from Vienna 

Audio guide

Oskar Kokoschka. A Rebel from Vienna

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Fundación BBVA

A painter, poet, writer, essayist, and playwright, Oskar Kokoschka (b. 1886; d. 1980) began his career in early 20th-century Vienna alongside artists Gustav Klimt (b. 1862; d. 1918) and Egon Schiele (b. 1890; d. 1918). His first works shocked the public and critics alike, earning him the nickname Oberwildling—“the most savage of them all.” Yet his rich personal and artistic path went on to span the 20th century and was intrinsically linked to the historical events that shaped it.
Throughout his career, Kokoschka demonstrated a thirst for independence and refrained from associating himself with artistic movements. If the artist accepted one epithet to describe himself, it was that of expressionist. “I am an expressionist because I do not know how to do anything other than express life.” His commitment to his art is reflected in each of his works and places him as an essential witness to his time and its transformations.
A radical artist from the start, he became a target of the Nazis, who considered him a representative of “degenerate art.” He fought against fascism with his work, becoming an influential figure for European reconciliation after World War II and actively participating in the cultural reconstruction of a devastated continent.
Galleries: 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curators: Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer in collaboration with Fabrice Hergott and Fanny Schulmann 
Venues: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Oskar Kokoschka 
The Painter II (The Painter and His Model II) [Der Maler II (Maler und Modell II)], 1923 
Oil on canvas 
85.5 × 130.5 cm 
Saint-Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May, 1983 
© Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, 2023, VEGAP, Bilbao

Oskar Kokoschka. A multifaceted artist

Kokoschka, An observer

Kokoschka, A rebel

Kokoschka, A Painter

Kokoschka, A Degenerate Artist

Kokoschka, A teacher

Kokoschka, A Humanist

Kokoschka, A Socially committed person

A painter, poet, writer, essayist, and playwright, Oskar Kokoschka (b. 1886; d. 1980) began his career in early 20th-century Vienna alongside artists

Oskar Kokoschka. A Rebel from Vienna | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Joan Miró. Absolute Reality

From Barcelona to Paris

Dream Paintings and Landscapes

Expressionisms. Toward the Constellations. White Paintings of 1945

Joan Miró (b. 1893, Barcelona; d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca) is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His work is admired for its radical formal innovations developed in the context of the first avant-garde movements, especially Dadaism and Surrealism. Miró was also interested in spiritual matters and fascinated by mysticism, visions, and dreams. His work, moreover, admits political readings, taking into consideration his sympathy for Catalan nationalism and his opposition to Franco’s dictatorship. Forty years after his death, his art has lost none of its seductively enigmatic nature.
Absolute Reality explores a key phase in Miró’s career, the period from 1920—his first trip to Paris— to 1945. These years are characterized by a constant flow of ideas ranging from his initial magic realism to a personal vocabulary of constellated or floating signs on ambiguous backgrounds. In this development, it becomes clear that prehistoric art, including rock paintings, petroglyphs, and statuettes, held a particular attraction for Miró, who proposed returning to the dawn of art in order to retrieve its original spiritual sense.
Miró effected a constant transformation of lived experience into art. Every mark he painted on his works corresponded to something specific, and was anchored to a profound reality that formed part of reality itself.
Gallery: 105 
Curator: Enrique Juncosa
Joan Miró 
Painting (The Sun) [Peinture (Le Soleil)], 1927 
Oil on canvas 
38.3 x 46.2 cm 
Courtesy The David &amp; Ezra Nahmad Collection 
© Successió Miró, 2023

Joan Miró

Training

Paris - Montroig

Exile and recognition

Experimentation and late work

In the Museum

Joan Miró. Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945

Joan Miró (b. 1893, Barcelona; d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca) is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His work is admired for its

Joan Miró. Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

3nd floor

BBK Secciones/Intersecciones

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

Works

British artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) is celebrated for her paintings of timeless subjects in everyday moments of happiness, comradery, and solitude. Her lush oils on canvas or coarse linen portray fictitious characters rendered in loose brushwork set against dramatic backgrounds. The artist does not work from models, rather the figures are composites, drawn from different sources including scrapbooks and drawings, memories and observations of everyday life. Details including clothing or costumes, footwear or the lack thereof dislocate the figures from any particular time or place. The paintings invite the viewer to slow down and to carefully observe; to enter the imaginary visual tales the artist spins. The poetic and thought-provoking titles of the works reinforce that much is left to the imagination of the beholder.
No Twilight Too Mighty presents a selection of over 70 paintings and charcoal drawings from 2020 to 2023 on display for the first time. The exhibition thus provides a rich opportunity to observe the continuum in the artist’s practice of creating evocative paintings that relate to the human experience. Yiadom- Boakye has recently returned to making charcoal drawings, which have a sense of immediacy given their intimate scale and air of improvisation. Seen in tandem with the paintings, the depth of the artist’s skillful handling of different media is evident.
The exhibition is organized in response to the relationships and dialogues that occur among the drawings and paintings. Visitors may enter the exhibition at any of the four galleries to view the marks, gestures and musings that make up No Twilight Too Mighty. A playlist compiled by Yiadom-Boakye specifically for this exhibition is available to visitors, providing greater context into the inspirational sources for her work.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye 
Divine Repose, 2021 
Oil on linen 
90 x 85 x 3.6 cm 
Courtesy the Artist, Corvi-Mora, London, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. No Twilight Too Mighty

British artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) is celebrated for her paintings of timeless subjects in everyday moments of happiness,

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. No Twilight Too Mighty | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Iberdrola

Retrospective exhibition of Japanese artist and writer Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Nagano), a singular voice recovered by the history of art and situated in the place that she deserves, turning her into a global cultural icon. During the last seven decades, Kusama has firmly chased her vanguardist vision, perfecting a unique personal aesthetic and a life-central philosophy. Her work captivates us with unlimited spaces and reflections on the natural regeneration cycles.
Yayoi Kusama narrates the artist’s life and work history, bringing to the foreground her longing for interconnectedness and the deep questions about the existence that drive her creative explorations. The most extensive retrospective of the artist celebrated in the last decade in Spain with nearly 200 artworks—paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and archive material that document her happenings and performances—the exhibition examines Kusama’s work since her first drawings as a teenager, during World War II, until her most recent immersive installations. Organized chronologically and thematically, the show recreates Kusama’s central themes: Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic, Death, and Force of Life, an in-depth view of the obsessive universe of an artist who has been trying for decades to shake up our universe with her work “to cure all humanity.”
Galleries: 103, 105 
Curators: Doryun Chong, Mika Yoshitake, Lucía Agirre 
Venues: M+, Hong Kong, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Yayoi Kusama 
Self Obliteration, 1966–74 
Paint on mannequins, table, chairs, wigs, handbag, mugs, plates, pitcher, 
ashtray, plastic plants, plastic flowers, and plastic fruit 
Dimensions variable 
M+, Hong Kong 
© YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now

Retrospective exhibition of Japanese artist and writer Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Nagano), a singular voice recovered by the history of art and

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Pablo Picasso worked with sculpture practically since the beginning of his long artistic career, as for the Málagaborn artist sculpture did not have a secondary status in his production: it was a form of expression comparable to painting, drawing, engraving or ceramics, since there are no major or minor arts, but only diverse languages and materials to express different aspects of creation. The body, the ultimate goal of representation and Picasso’s main instrument throughout his career, constitutes the fundamental pillar of this exhibition.
The selection of sculptures in Picasso. Matter and Body will cover the almost infinite plurality of styles used by the artist to represent human body forms, deconstructing it through different formats and genres, to construct it again in a new matter, for which he indistinctly used all the possible means and objects within his reach, integrating them into an unprecedented group of sculptures. Julio González situated Picasso’s sculptural view in the genesis of all his work: “I have often observed that there is no way to be indifferent. He always watches, at all times, because all shapes represent something to him, and he sees everything as a sculptor . . . . In my opinion, the mysterious side, the neuralgic center, if we can call it that way, of Picasso’s work is in the ‘Sculpture’ that has given so much talk about his work and that has given him so much glory.”
Galleries: second floor 
Curators: Carmen Giménez, Lucía Agirre 
Venues: Museo Picasso Málaga, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Pablo Picasso 
Figure: Project for a Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire 
(Figure: projet pour un monument à Guillaume Apollinaire), 1928 
Iron wire and plate 
59.5 x 13 x 32 cm 
Musée national Picasso-Paris, gift by Pablo Picasso, 1979, 
Inv. Nr.: MP265 
Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris)/ Adrien Didierjean 
© Succesion Pablo Picasso

Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body

Pablo Picasso worked with sculpture practically since the beginning of his long artistic career, as for the Málagaborn artist sculpture did not have a

Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The works of Marine Hugonnier (b. 1969, Paris), an acclaimed French artist and filmmaker located in London, constantly seek to alter our resources for interpreting the world.
To do so, she uses documentary and fiction strategies fluidly with one another, taking advantage of the intrinsic ambiguities of each. In her last decade’s production, direct observation of social processes encounters its counterpoint in film experiments in which the image capture traditional device—with movie, lens, and camera as irreducible elements—is faced with natural agents and phenomena and searches in them the limits of representation. In her recent work Meadow Report (2021), the artist stands at twilight in front of a pond in the Giverny Gardens, where Claude Monet created an artificial garden of exotic plants and painted his celebrated Water Lilies in the last decades of his life, while he was progressively losing his sight. Hugonnier covers these two fundamental topics—the manipulation of nature, on the one hand, and our dependence on technology to observe it, on the other—through a contemplative and silent landscape registry. Her search for a direct perception leads her to remove the camera lens at a particular moment in the film, causing an intense blue fade of all the details: a chromatic collapse. The title of the piece plays with the literal meaning of the word “meadow” and the reference to the Meadows Report, also known as The Limits to Growth (1972), one of the first documents in which the climate crisis as a result of the uncontrolled use of the planet’s resources was predicted. This central piece by Hugonnier will be accompanied by other films and photographs that, both in gallery 103 and in a screening cycle in the Museum Auditorium, will give an account of the recent practice of this artist and her unique conception of film making.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
Marine Hugonnier 
Meadow Report, 2021 
Film 35mm, color, sonido 
Courtesy the artist 
© Marine Hugonnier

Marine Hugonnier: Field Reports

The works of Marine Hugonnier (b. 1969, Paris), an acclaimed French artist and filmmaker located in London, constantly seek to alter our resources for

Marine Hugonnier: Field Reports | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

In the fall of 2023, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present a retrospective devoted to the work of German-Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, b. 1912, Hamburg; d. 1994, Caracas).
This chronological survey will chart the evolution of the artist’s distinctive approach to abstraction through her organic forms, linear structures, and systematic spatial investigations. Among the works featured in this presentation will include the artist’s sculptures, drawings, prints, artist’s books, and textiles ranging from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. Gego is one of the most significant artists to emerge in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Trained as an architect and engineer in Germany in 1939, she fled Nazi persecution and immigrated to Venezuela, where she embarked on her artistic career. The exhibition will demonstrate Gego’s significant formal and conceptual contributions to modern and contemporary art, highlighting her intersections with key transnational art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction, Kinetic art, Minimalism, and Post-Minimalism.
The museum is thankful for the tremendous support and close collaboration provided by the Fundación Gego and its directors, Tomas Gunz and Barbara Gunz, as well as the Foundation’s staff and Board, who generously provided unrestricted access to their collection and archives.
This exhibition forms part of a larger tour presented at Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Curator: Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
Gego installing Reticulárea at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1969 
Photo: Juan Santana 
© Fundación Gego

Gego: Measuring Infinity

In the fall of 2023, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present a retrospective devoted to the work of German-Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt,

Gego: Measuring Infinity | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

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Exhibitions

Oskar Kokoschka. A Rebel from Vienna

03.17.2023 - 09.03.2023

Joan Miró. Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945

02.10.2023 - 05.28.2023

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

01.24.2023 - 12.31.2023

Exhibitions

upcoming

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. No Twilight Too Mighty

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now

Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body

Marine Hugonnier: Field Reports

Gego: Measuring Infinity

Exhibitionspast

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