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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

Audio guide Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now

Introductory Artist Conversation

Iberdrola

Self-Portrait

Infinity

Accumulation

Radical Connectivity

Biocosmic

Death

Force of Life

Infinity Mirrored Room

“What does living a life mean? I lose myself in this thought every time I create artwork.” Yayoi Kusama.
“Dissolution and accumulation; propagation and separation; particulate obliteration and unseen reverberations from the universe—these were to become the foundations of my art, and they were already taking shape at this time.” Yayoi Kusama. 
Japanese artist and writer Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Nagano) is a singular figure who has been revered by art historians for her pioneering career that span multiple art movements from the 1960s to the present, and has achieved the status of a global cultural icon. Over the last seven decades, Kusama has pursued her avant-garde vision with conviction and perfected her personal aesthetic, which reflects her philosophy of life. 
This exhibition focuses on the existential questions that drive Kusama’s creative explorations. Through paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and archival materials documenting her happenings and performances, the show offers an in-depth survey of Kusama’s work from her first drawings as a teenager during World War II to her most recent immersive, mirrored installations. Organized chronologically and thematically, the show addresses six key themes that recur throughout the artist’s life: Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic, Death, and Force of Life. These interrelated themes have recurred and evolved within the obsessive universe of Kusama, who has been valiantly agitating the art scene and society for decades to promote “healing of all mankind.”
Galleries: 103, 105 
Curated by Doryun Chong and Mika Yoshitake in collaboration with Lucía Agirre 
Venues: M+, Hong Kong, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 
Exhibition organized by M+, Hong Kong in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Yayoi Kusama 
Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki 
Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. 
© YAYOI KUSAMA
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Yayoi Kusama

Early paintings

Installations, performances and fashion

International recognition

Today

VIDEO ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

In the Museum

We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

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VIRTUAL TOUR

“What does living a life mean? I lose myself in this thought every time I create artwork.” Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

3nd floor

Audio guide

BBK_new

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

Pablo Picasso (b. 1881; d. 1973) worked with sculpture from practically the beginning of his long career. For the Málaga-born artist, it was not a lesser medium but a form of expression on a par with painting, drawing, or engraving. In his practice, there were no major and minor arts but different languages and materials with which to transmit various aspects of his creation. The body, the ultimate objective of Picasso’s representation and his main instrument throughout his career, is the cornerstone of this exhibition, one of the events held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.
This selection of sculptures ranges across the many styles used by Picasso to represent the forms of the human body, deconstructing it in order to recompose it. To this end, he made use indistinctly of all the means and objects within his reach, integrating them in a whole that had never before been seen. Sculptor Julio González saw Picasso’s sculptural gaze as lying at the genesis of his entire oeuvre: “I have often observed that there is no form that leaves him indifferent. He looks at everything, at every moment, because all forms represent something for him, and he sees everything as a sculptor […]. In my opinion, the mysterious side, the nerve center so to speak, of Picasso’s oeuvre is in the ‘sculpture’ that has made his work so talked about, that has won him so much glory.”
Galleries: second floor 
Curators: Carmen Giménez, Lucía Agirre 
Venues: Museo Picasso Málaga, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 
Exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in collaboration with the Museo Picasso Málaga
Pablo Picasso 
Figure: Project for a Monument to 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 (b. 1881; d. 1973) worked with sculpture from practically the beginning of his long career. For the Málaga-born artist, it was not a lesser

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

Seguros Bilbao - Seremos Occidente

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

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now

06.27.2023 - 10.08.2023

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

01.24.2023 - 12.31.2023

Exhibitions

upcoming

Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body

Marine Hugonnier: Field Reports

Gego. Measuring Infinity

Exhibitionspast

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