Past

Exhibitions

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

Exhibitions | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Past | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Sections/Intersections

Opening Talk

Gallery 103

Audio guide

Gallery 105

2nd floor

3nd floor

BBK Secciones/Intersecciones

September 8, 2022 – January 22, 2023

Material Life

September 20, 2022 - January 22, 2023

Marking History

October 19, 2022 – February 26, 2023

Unfolding Narratives

Yayoi Kusama

In 2022, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an ambitious presentation of works from the permanent collection that unfolds throughout the galleries museum-wide. 
The exhibition is conceived as a large triptych, constructed through three thematic approaches that are placed in dialogue with one another, as a means to rediscover works that have historically defined both the interior and the exterior of the Museum. Thus, in Sections/Intersections, each floor of the building offers a section of the collection in three primary axes: Material Life, Unfolding Narratives, and Marking History. For the first time, this exhibition offers a panoramic view of the wealth of the cultural and artistic holdings the Museum has acquired through the present day. Also in celebration of the Museum’s 25th Anniversary is an exceptional installation by Yayoi Kusama on view at Gallery 103.

Curators: Lekha Hileman Waitoller, Manuel Cirauqui, Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Lucía Agirre, Maite Borjabad
El Anatsui 
Rising Sea, 2019 
Aluminum and copper wire 
800 x 1400 cm 
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

If materials could talk…

Mona Hatoum

Jannis Kounellis

Asier Mendizabal

Yoko Ono

If Walls Could Talk…

El Anatsui

Jenny Holzer

Jeff Koons

Sol Lewitt

Joseph Beuys

Christian Boltanski

Francesco Clemente

Abigail Lazkoz

In the Museum

We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition Sections / Intersections. 25 Years of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

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VIRTUAL TOUR

Sections / Intersections. 25 Years of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

In 2022, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an ambitious presentation of works from the permanent collection that

Sections / Intersections. 25 Years of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Bilbao, 1989

Raquel Asensi

Nora Aurrekoetxea Etxebarria

Bilbao, 1990

Helena Goñi

Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1986

Jon Gorospe

Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1984

Gala Knörr

Logroño, 1993

Maite Pinto

Quito, 1981

Karla Tobar Abarca

Bilbao, 1981

Alain Urrutia

Quito, 1984

Cristian Villavicencio

Bilbao, 1988

Diego Vivanco

This exhibition brings together artwork by ten artists who participated in the Basque Artist Program, a joint initiative of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Launched in 2015, and open to artists who were born or are residents in the Basque Country, this program selects two persons each year to take part in an intensive orientation of the New York art scene, providing participants with a unique learning experience designed to foster exchange as well as to advance their professional skills. Among the selected artists included in this exhibition are Raquel Asensi, Nora Aurrekoetxea Etxebarria, Helena Goñi, Jon Gorospe, Gala Knörr, Maite Pinto, Karla Tobar Abarca, Alain Urrutia, Cristian Villavicencio, and Diego Vivanco. These contemporary artists explore notions of identity, history, representation, and both collective and individual memory across a myriad of mediums, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, video, site-specific installation, and performance. Concentrating on recent artwork, this presentation features a cohesive selection of works from various contemporary art practices, focusing on the work produced by these artists after their participation in the Program.
Curated by: Lucía Agirre and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, curators, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Karla Tobar Abarca (Quito, 1981) 
&lt;scanner-pack&gt;project_documentary, 2022 
Video, color, stereo sound, 30 min 
Collection of the artist 
Photo © Karla Tobar

Basque Artist Program, 2015–19

This exhibition brings together artwork by ten artists who participated in the Basque Artist Program, a joint initiative of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Basque Artist Program, 2015–19 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Otolith Group. O Horizon

Talks with Artists

Audioguide

Since 2002, the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar, b. 1968, London; and Kodwo Eshun, b. 1966, London) has produced films, audio works, installations, exhibitions, and texts informed by extensive research, decolonial thinking and transcultural friendship. Borrowing their name from a small apparatus within the inner ear of vertebrate animals—a sensitive structure by which bodies orientate, balance, recognize acceleration and position—the artists allegorically mark their intention to operate on multiple dimensions simultaneously.
At the center of this exhibition is the film installation O Horizon, a major work depicting the Visva Bharati school in Santiniketan (West Bengal, India), founded by the writer, educator, and social reformist, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. In guiding modern India toward cultural independence and transformation, Tagore anticipated some of the key issues of our global present, such as the environmental emergency, the threat of nationalist and religious extremisms, and the importance of intergenerational transmission. The Otolith Group gages the enduring presence of Tagore’s vision in present-day Santiniketan. The film is introduced by a poem from 1896 in which the latter questions future readers (“today in a hundred years”) about the arrival of spring season and the blooming nature around them. One of the opening impulses in O Horizon is to stage an encounter, in which the viewer responds to Tagore’s poetic inquiry about what might be sent back from the future.
In an exuberant sequence of registers, the film guides us through the campus and its dances, rehearsals and rituals; indoor and outdoor classes; microphones record the mystical songs of Kabir, epic poetry, as well as conversations and plays; lenses capture animal gazes and vegetal depths, observed in silence. Everywhere Tagore’s ecological vision is present as a key to his foundation of Visva Bharati, a place of confluence for arts and crafts in connection with a pedagogy of the Earth. His efforts, cultural and agricultural, to reinvigorate the land by bringing soil from nearby areas, turned Santiniketan into a fertile and vibrant terrain years later. A crucial stage to this transformation emerges at the uppermost layer of soil, in the decomposition and transformation of leaves, grass, fruit, and animal debris form the surface layer agronomists name the “O Horizon”, from which the entire film project takes its title. The Otolith Group considers the poetic and political underpinnings of such a fragile and dynamic space not only as a crucial element for Tagore’s ethos which continues to inform a contemporary thought that is both ecologic and cosmopolitical.
Extensions of this thinking become visible through a series of photomontages titled Santiniketan Studies, a selection of which is presented by the exhibition entrance. This work by The Otolith Group may be seen as a sketch book accompanying the production of O Horizon, but also as an expansion of the film’s archeologic and speculative impulse. Every picture presents the multiple dimensions of various enclaves in the campus, summoning key figures, such as Mahatma Gandhi or the artist and educator K. G. Subramanyan, while layers of generational memory coexist anachronistically. Trees are, meanwhile, a recurring motif in the series—they appear at the center of outdoor circles as the characteristic “tree schools” of Tagore’s educational system. As emblems of nature’s longevity, they are also a manifestation of the regenerative agronomy and the “terraforming” project implemented at Santiniketan since its inception.
Also exhibited in this space is a selection of works on paper by the artist Vidya Sagar (b. 1938; d. 2016), father of Anjalika Sagar, and collaborator in various films by The Otolith Group, to whom O Horizon is dedicated. Sagar was part of a generation who received the influence of Tagore’s school and Santiniketan’s spirit amid the radical cultural transformations in 1960s India. He was one of the most notable examples of Visva Bharati’s transversal culture, according to which all artistic languages communicate with one another. Sagar’s Tantric abstractions use sensuous outlines and delicate pastel hues to generate moments of visual musicality that reinterpret the patterns of Indian iconographies resonating throughout the allusive poetics of O Horizon.
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
The Otolith Group. O Horizon, 2018. 
Film still. Courtesy the artists 
© The Otolith Group

Since 2002, the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar, b. 1968, London; and Kodwo Eshun, b. 1966, London) has produced films, audio works, installations,

The Otolith Group. O Horizon | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Elssie Ansareo 
“This year, we carried out an exciting project with the children at San Vicente de Paúl School in Barakaldo. Under the title Women in Art, we explored the work of various female artists from different parts of the world, beginning with those closest to us. We chose artists from the nineteenth and the twentieth century who stood out in a variety of disciplines. We used drawing as our technique, and artist’s books and animation as our media to reach out to our audience and show them what women artists are capable of doing.”

Artists

Ansareo, Elssie  LTA 2022

Ibon Garagarza 
“Given the characteristics of the center I was to work at, a small one-room school, this promised to be the most demanding edition of Learning Through Art for me. But I had a nice surprise. It was a very small school, where terms like ‘share,’ ‘cooperate,’ and ‘live together’ were so common, and our project reflected this spirit, leaving no-one behind.

I would like to thank the teaching staff for their advice and support. Working with such a heterogeneous group in terms of knowledge, skills, and interests was quite a challenge. Our journey through the universe, through time and art, has been an inspiring and rewarding experience. I hope the students felt the same.”

Artistas

Garagarza, Ibon LTA 2022

Zaloa Ipiña 
“From language diversity to dialect nuances, ours has been an exploratory journey in which we discovered the close ties between Basque culture and nature, as shown in Carnival celebrations, and between language and geography. Using creativity and multiple artistic expressions – sculpture, action art, video, animation and illustration –, we came up with interesting readings of the special characteristics of the culture we shared.”

Ipiña, Zaloa LTA 2022

Nerea Lekuona 
“Working in a multicultural environment has been a very rewarding experience. As the school year progressed, our itinerary followed the news. The Russia-Ukraine war stirred us into action and we had the idea of making an art installation. We then saw that armed conflicts were taking place in other countries as well, and that children were one of the most vulnerable groups. Our installation was a safe place for girls and boys forced by war to leave their homelands.

We designed a ‘new home’ where they would get reassuring messages from the class, put together in a whispering sound piece. The teachers played a key role all along.”

Lekuona, Nerea LTA 2022

Maider López 
“Measuring spaces with our bodies, binding the chairs we sat on, drawing the lines that connected places, people, and experiences… Desks in blue, chairs in red, objects in yellow… Nimbe said there were more yellow than blue lines, but I felt we had drawn more blue lines. When we checked, there were more yellow lines.

Then we discussed how warm colors seemed to be closer to us, whereas cool colors seemed to be more distant. Maybe this is why we saw so many yellow lines… This prompted us to change plans: instead of continuing with our original project, we focused on colors, experimenting with distances, bodies, and spaces. We adapted to what was going on around us, to our little discoveries.”

López, Maider LTA 2022

Ibon Sáenz de Olazagoitia 
“These days, when reality insists on making things difficult and pessimism is all around, we wanted to take on an idealistic view of the future, materialized in imaginary worlds. Our project focused on utopia, dealing with everyday affairs and topics of interest from a utopian perspective that kindled imagination.

Each student designed their own personal, oneiric world based on their feelings and desires, drawing maps and making recreations. In creating their non-places, they established interesting relationships, realizing that freedom and independence matter, but so does living together and being part of a community.”
&nbsp;

Sáenz de Olazagoitia, Ibon LTA 2022

Learning Through Art 2022

Learnign Through Art programme presentation video

19 students, 5th grade, Txomin Aresti School, Leioa

LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD

25 students, 4th grade, San Vicente de Paúl School, Barakaldo

WOMEN IN ART

17 students, 4th grade, Egape School, Urnieta

COLORS, BODIES, AND DISTANCES

20 students, 5th grade, Miguel de Cervantes School, Vitoria-Gasteiz

NEW HOMES

21 students, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, Samaniego School, Vitoria-Gasteiz

UTOPIA AND IMAGINARY WORLDS

33 students, 1st- to 6th-grade students, Turtziozko Eskola, Trucios-Turtzioz

A LOOK AT HISTORY AND THE UNIVERSE

Every year, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao puts up a summer exhibition in which the artists are schoolchildren. This exhibition is the closing event of Learning Through Art, the education and art program carried out throughout the school year and sponsored by BBK.
The six artists who embarked on this adventure with elementary schoolchildren in 2021-2022 were Elssie Ansareo, Ibon Garagarza, Zaloa Ipiña, Nerea Lekuona, Maider López, and Ibon Sáenz de Olazagoitia.
Learning Through Art (LTA) shows children – this year, almost 140 of them – how to deal with curriculum content from a different perspective. Social Studies, Science, Spanish/Basque, and Mathematics were some of the subjects dealt with in LTA 2021-2022.
The artists came up with interdisciplinary projects to deal with a variety of topics, including the recent Russia-Ukraine war and forced displacement, language and communication, concomitant migration issues, taking care of the Earth and imagining a utopian future, the beauty of the universe, and the role of women in art. All of them were current affairs and part of the elementary school curriculum at once.
LTA encourages children to ask questions, give free rein to curiosity, and make room for play and improvisation, research and exploration, trial and error. In the artistic process, kids think, assess, choose, try, have doubts, have fun, get dirty, get lost, get stuck, and, of course, make mistakes – for there can be no progress without mistakes.

BILBAO-NEW YORK EXCHANGE

PROGRAM

HISTORY

Every year, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao puts up a summer exhibition in which the artists are schoolchildren. This exhibition is the closing event of

Learning Through Art 2022 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Serra/Seurat. Drawings

Talk an Introduction

Georges Seurat

Richard Serra

Georges Seurat. An Artists' Artist

French artist Georges Seurat (b. 1859; d. 1891), the pioneer of the Pointillist pictorial movement, took drawing to new heights that ensured him a place among the great masters of the technique. It was not only his contemporaries who admired his works on paper. They have also been venerated by later artists, like American Richard Serra (b. 1938), who considers drawing an autonomous language which he subjects to new processes, experimenting with it in different formats and materials. This exhibition presents works produced by both artists in the medium, evidencing their enormous artistic value.
Something apparently so simple as a piece of paper acquires great transcendence in Seurat’s drawings, as it becomes an element that determines the work in a certain way. The artist feels the material to the point where he makes it talk. What distinguishes great masters is this knowledge of the support, which Seurat almost brings alive, allowing it to absorb exactly the right amount of Conté in each case to create lights, volumes, and contrasts.
Likewise, Richard Serra discovered in his formative period that “procedure [is] dictated by the material,” which imposes “its own form on the form.” In his Ramble Drawings series, begun in 2015, the artist revels in the support, a hand- made Japanese paper in which every fiber generates a different accident that is integrated by Serra in his work. In this way, no Ramble resembles any other owing to the artist’s manner of marking the paper and because every sheet differs from all the rest.
Curators: Lucía Agirre, curator, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, and Judith Benhamou, independent curator and art writer.
Georges Seurat 
Reclining Man (Study for “Bathers at Asnières”) [L’homme Couché (Étude pour “une Baignade, Asnières”)], 1883-84 
Conté crayon on paper 
24.5 x 31.5 cm 
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler 
Photo: Peter Schibli

TECHNIQUES AND PROCESSES IN THE DRAWINGS OF SERRA AND SEURAT

SEURAT AND HIS SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF LIGHT

SERRA: TIME AND ARTISTIC PROCESS

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

French artist Georges Seurat (b. 1859; d. 1891), the pioneer of the Pointillist pictorial movement, took drawing to new heights that ensured him a place

Serra/Seurat. Drawings | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture

Presentation/Talk by Norman Foster

Cadillac

Sennheiser

Gestamp

IBERDROLA

Volkswagen

BEGINNINGS

SCULPTURES

POPULARISING

SPORTING

VISIONARIES

AMERICANA

FUTURE

CLAY MODELLING STUDIO

Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture celebrates the artistic dimension of the automobile and links it to the parallel worlds of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography and film. In this holistic approach, the exhibition challenges the separate silos of these disciplines and explores how they are visually and culturally linked together.
The exhibition considers the affinities between technology and art, showing for example how the use of the wind tunnel helped to aerodynamically shape the automobile to go faster with more economic use of power. This streamlining revolution was echoed in works of the Futurist movement and by other artists of the period. It was also reflected in the industrial design of everything, from household appliances to locomotives.
The exhibition brings together nearly forty automobiles—each the best of its kind in such terms as beauty, rarity, technical progress and a vision of the future. These are placed centre stage in the galleries and surrounded by significant works of art and architecture. Many of these have never before left their homes in private collections and public institutions, so they are being opened up to a wider audience for the first time. Unlike any other single invention, the automobile has completely transformed the urban and rural landscape of our planet and in turn our lifestyle. We are on the edge of a new revolution of electric power, so this exhibition could be seen as a requiem for the last days of combustion.
Curated by Norman Foster; Lekha Hileman Waitoller, Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Giotto Bizzarrini 
Ferrari 250 GTO, 1962 
Ten Tenths 
© Ben de Chair

Benz Patent Motor Car, 1886

Ford Model T, 1914

Bugatti Type 35, 1924

Ford Pierson Brothers Coupé, 1934

Tatra T87, 1948

Fiat Nuova 500, 1957

Ferrari GTO 250, 1962

Jaguar E-Type, 1963

Lancia Stratos Zero, 1970

Volkswagen ID. BUZZ, 2022

Video about The Exhibition

We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture celebrates the artistic dimension of the automobile and links it to the parallel worlds of painting, sculpture,

Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Monira Al Qadiri: Holy Quarter

The Film &amp; Video exhibitions program is permanently committed to contemporary artistic practices associated with the moving image and explores the fertile relationship between the visual arts, film installations, and contemporary culture in its broadest sense.
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is a Kuwaiti artist born in Senegal, educated in Japan, and currently living in Berlin. In her work, she uses multiple mediums to explore unknown aspects of colonial history, oil cultures, and the formation of identities in the Middle East. In a region whose geostrategic interest is closely tied to its energy resources, the radical transformation in local ways of life dovetails with the acceleration of industry’s impact on planetary ecosystems. In its sandy landscapes which reach the highest temperatures on the planet, the artist finds potential narratives that simultaneously hurl us to the prehistoric past and to an increasingly less hypothetical future of overwarming and global desertification.
Her recent work, Holy Quarter (2020), takes us on a dreamlike journey through an immense site called Rub al-Khali, located between Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The depth of the sandy images in the film is only comparable to its soundtrack, composed by Fatima Al Qadiri, the artist’s sister and regular collaborator. Using sound as the engine driving the fiction, the point of departure of Holy Quarter is the story of British explorer Harry St. John Philby, who crossed the Arab desert in the 1930s in search of the mythical lost city of Ubar, an “Atlantis of the sands,” which the Quran says was destroyed by divine anger in times immemorial. In its place, what the explorer found was the remains of one of the most important visible meteor impacts on our planet. Even today, mineral fragments of the impact can be found around the Wabar crater, which Philby first took for a volcano. Monira Al Qadiri views these stones as the emissaries of a cosmic, collective spirit.
With its deep, slow voice, the spirit of Wabar accompanies the images with its story and is materialized in the exhibition space as a striking set of sculptures. Made of blown glass, simultaneously delicate yet massively thick, these iridescent pieces evoke both black pearls and huge drops of oil. Speaking in first person in the film, they tell the story of their arrival on our planet and express their dismay at the imminent catastrophes while also encouraging us to work together to reverse them.
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
Film Stills : 
Monira Al Qadiri. Holy Quarter, 2020. Installation, 20-minute film and 46 glass sculptures (film still). Commissioned by Haus der Kunst, Munich. Courtesy the artist © Monira Al Qadiri
Installation views: 
Monira Al Qadiri, Holy Quarter (2020). Installation view at Haus der Kunst, Munich. 20-minute film and 46 glass sculptures. Photo: Maximilian Geuter. Courtesy the artist © Monira Al Qadiri
<a href="https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2022/03/Cartelas-Monira-tra.pdf">+ INFO</a>

The Film &amp; Video exhibitions program is permanently committed to contemporary artistic practices associated with the moving image and explores the

Monira Al Qadiri: Holy Quarter | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Talks Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration

Miss Cholera (Miss Choléra)

Lady's Body (Corps de Dame)

Portrait of the Soldier Lucien Geominne (Portrait du soldat Lucien Geominne)

The Knoll of Visions (La butte aux visions)

The Burning Life of the Earth (Vie ardente du sol)

Substance of Stars (Substance d'astre)

Nunc Stans

Bidon l'Esbroufe

Mute Permute

The Misunderstanding (La Mésentente)

Sight G 132 (Kowloon) [Mire G 132 (Kowloon)]

Given (Donnée)

At the end of World War II, Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) began exhibiting paintings that defied entrenched artistic values. He rejected principles of decorum and classical beauty, along with pretentions of expertise. Instead, he looked to the commonplace and the unheralded, employing crude materials, mundane subjects, and a style that spurned any outward sign of academic training.
In this approach, Dubuffet was challenging norms that he believed obstructed authentic expression and devalued everyday experience. However, his goal was not only to reveal how threadbare cultural conventions were; he also wanted to illustrate the vitality of life freed from them. As he once claimed, “I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and . . . make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.”
Jean Dubuffet 
The Misunderstanding (La Mésentente), March 12, 1978 
Acrylic on paper, mounted to canvas 
139.4 x 241.9 cm 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, By exchange 86.3405 
© Jean Dubuffet, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2022

besides his experimentation in visual art, Jean Dubuffet also worked on a series of musical experiences?

We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

At the end of World War II, Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) began exhibiting paintings that defied entrenched artistic values. He rejected principles of decorum

Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration | 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.