Past

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

Audio guide

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

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 the Museum

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

Audio guide map

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

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

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

Maria Helena and Arpad

The Anatomy of space

Checkmate: dancers, chess players, and card players

World War II: A view from Rio de Janeiro

Return to Paris

Cities: Real and imagined

Exteriors and interiors

Shades of white

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born into an affluent family in Lisbon on June 13, 1908. Her father died when she was only 2 years old, and her mother was left to raise her with the support of her family. As she grew up, Vieira da Silva was exposed to art and theater, and developed a taste for music that had a lasting impact on her. She studied painting and drawing at the Escola de Belas-Artes in Lisbon and in 1928 she moved to Paris to continue her training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she met her future husband, Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes. They lived in Paris until the outbreak of World War II, when they took refuge in Rio de Janeiro, only to return to Paris seven years later. By the late 1950s, Vieira da Silva achieved great fame and recognition for her complex abstract works. She continued to paint into the late 1980s and was the recipient of numerous awards, including Commandeure de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres bestowed on her by the French government in 1960. Vieira da Silva died on March 6, 1992 in Paris.
This exhibition surveys 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 in her work. The exhibition is grounded in a selection of key paintings showing Vieira da Silva’s repeated and continuously evolving deployment of abstract forms and optical illusions. Concurrently, it draws 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.
Vieira da Silva’s work incorporates 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 and the abstraction of Cubism and Futurism. Her own vocabulary is based on checkerboards, networks of intertwined lines, elusive perspectives and receding spaces, which suggest in Vieira da Silva’s own words that “A painting is never finished”.
Vieira da Silva’s work is historically tied to both Peggy Guggenheim’s and Solomon R. Guggenheim’s legacies. She featured as one of the 31 artists included in Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition 31 Women held at her museum-gallery Art of This Century in 1943, while Hilla Rebay was one of the first supporters of Vieira da Silva’s work, having purchased Composition (1936) now part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Founding Collection in 1937.
Vieira da Silva reluctantly spoke about her work because she believed that “…painters may sound stupid when we talk. We know a lot of things, but we say them in our paintings.” However, once pressed for an explanation, she summed up her practice in a few poignant words: “As a rule, I don’t like works that flaunt their complications. I prefer those refined works that allow us to feel and guess, from a distance, the complexity of the things in the world.”
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

The artist's studio

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

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VIRTUAL TOUR

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born into an affluent family in Lisbon on June 13, 1908. Her father died when she was only 2 years old, and her mother

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

Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka explores Indigenous culture, history, and traditional beliefs through themes of identity, memory, language, and myth. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people of Southern California, Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, in the United States. The Pacific Northwest holds a special place in Hopinka’s artwork, especially as he delves into investigating notions of homeland, personhood, and landscape. In particular, his films reflect on the complexities of contemporary Indigenous life by blending non-narrative filmmaking, poetry, and abstract imagery with an ethnopoetic approach—a response against the ethnographic gaze that has long objectified Indigenous cultures in moving image.
Ethnopoetic cinema examines themes of cultural identity, displacement, and the everyday experience through a combination of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques, thereby emphasizing the artistic and performative aspects of cultural expression. At the core of Hopinka’s work is a profound commitment to storytelling through his Indigenous perspective, a narrative that has long been marginalized within the Western canon. He explains, “Part of the desire I had to make films was to tell Indigenous stories that were unique to my own community and my own identity.”
In Fainting Spells (2018), Hopinka explores the creation story of Xąwįska, or Indian Pipe Plant, also known as ghost flower or corpse plant. This medicinal flowering plant is traditionally used by the Ho-Chunk people to revive those who have fainted and is also emblematic of Indigenous identity, knowledge, and culture. Moreover, its symbolism can be linked to cycles of life and death, or a connection to the spiritual world. Although Hopinka could not unearth a myth for the plant to determine its origins through his extensive research, he instead created one to engage with and reclaim the practice of mythkeepers and mythmaking in his own Indigenous culture.
The three-channel short film begins with a handwritten poem that moves across scenes of expansive colorful landscape accompanied by lyrical music. The poem, which is also listed below, speaks to Xąwįska directly, who later appears personified as a cloaked figure, and leads viewers on a walk through the spirit world in different states of consciousness. Filmed in Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon, and New Mexico, Hopinka creates a dreamlike visual narrative by collaging together music, poetry, sound, color, and imagery into a unique immersive experience in this new edition created specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-534378 size-full" src="http://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07.jpg" alt="Sky hopinka" width="1920" height="1082" srcset="https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07.jpg 1920w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-300x169.jpg 300w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-1024x577.jpg 1024w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-768x433.jpg 768w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-1536x866.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" />
Poem in Fainting Spells (2018)
Xąwįska, you’ve fainted again. 
I plucked a flower from your shoulder blade 
and rolled it between my fingers 
until it was a light gray mash. 
I lit it on fire and blew the smoke onto your face. 
As I waited for you to wake I thought of the times your laughter 
woke me from a daydream. 
What are these blue-greens, oranges and pinks? 
The swirling plume of smoke that begs you to rise? 
These questions I always meant to ask. 
When you finally rose, you blew the smoke out onto your hands 
and spoke of my mother.
Xąwįska, you’ve sat outside for too long. 
Night is falling and the spirits can see us. 
It’s time to go home. 
You had told me, “When you see the red oaks follow the water. 
Then, when you find a fork in the river 
there will be a lovely piece of land. 
Remove everything that shines from your hands, 
from your neck, from your body, 
and swim to the nearest shore.”
Xąwįska, you’ve fainted again. 
I tried to revive you, the way that I know. 
You never want to rise. You lay there, still. 
You taught me to sing the songs of our brothers 
so that our relatives will know who we are. 
“So loud will be our voices that they’ll reach the sky!” 
That is what you told me. That is what I remember.
Xąwįska, you’ve fallen again. I pluck flowers from your shoulder, 
your arm, your leg. 
I mash them up and set them ablaze. 
Xąwįska, you are so quiet. 
I am beside you and breathe a breath full of your smoke. 
Exhale onto you. 
You smolder and ash and collapse. 
I am alone again. 
I think of that place you once described, 
between the fork in the river with the oaks, 
as the sky turns red. 
I have stayed here up until now. 
For a long time I have remained here. 
Now, I myself will go wandering around the edge of encircling lake.
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's Biography

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells

Sky Hopinka explores Indigenous culture, history, and traditional beliefs through themes of identity, memory, language, and myth. A member of the Ho-Chunk

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

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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 - 10.31.2026

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

10.16.2025 - 02.20.2026

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells

09.18.2025 - 02.20.2026

Exhibitionspast

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