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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

Yoshitomo Nara

Audio guide

Audio guide map

Opening Talk nara

Private visit with the Curator

Fundación BBVA

A Lonely Place

Searching for What Was Missing

After the Quake

Thinking in Silence

Dialogues with Tradition

Drawing the Lines and Advocating Peace

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His work is widely recognized for its bold, cartoon-like images of children with large heads and big, engaging eyes—at times menacing, challenging, and defiant, or else melancholic, and uncertain, but, over the years, increasingly calm and meditative. Nara was not immediately accepted in the art world, but his pioneering, graphic style is now well established.
Nara’s characters—his figures, animals, and hybrid beings—are a representation of himself. They provide a visual expression of his innermost thoughts and emotions and convey the depth of his humanism. The sources of Nara’s creativity are his deeply-etched memories of childhood; his knowledge of music and literature; Japanese and European art history, fostered by his boundless curiosity; and his empathetic and galvanizing encounters with people and cultures through his travels in Japan and abroad.
Nara has a long-standing love of folk, rock, and underground punk music and is renowned for his free-spirited attitude. His engagement with humanity and society is profound, and, with strongly-held views on the world we share, his work examines and incorporates ideas surrounding concepts of home, community, nature, and the environment, and their interconnectedness.
Born in 1959 in suburban Hirosaki, in northern Japan, Nara went on to study painting at the University of the Arts in Aichi. In the late 1980s, he moved to Germany to attend the prestigious Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He would remain in Germany for twelve years and during this time he continued to develop his unique pictorial language. In 2000 Nara returned to Japan, where he continues to live and work today. His art relates directly to his own history and lived experiences. At its core are the lasting memories from his childhood in Japan—predominantly his feelings of loneliness—and from his time spent abroad, with the familiar sense of isolation he knew in Germany, where he did not speak the language.
This retrospective exhibition is not displayed chronologically. Nara has purposefully planned it to present his works within themes that communicate their underlying personal and emotional foundations. His intention is to reveal who he is as an artist and the ideas that interest him and are central to his creative process: his recurring motifs, his evolving formal approach, and his varied techniques.
This exhibition takes us on a journey through the intriguing “World of Nara,” presenting work made over the last four decades. Nara’s imagery is original and enduring. It demonstrates the continuity of memory he has sustained throughout his career and serves to highlight his stylistic development. First and foremost, Nara views himself as a painter, but he explores each theme within a range of other mediums and formats—drawing, sculpture, and installation.
Gallery: 105 
Curator: Lucía Agirre 
Venues: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden; Hayward Gallery-Southbank Centre, London
 
Yoshitomo Nara 
In the Deepest Puddle II, 1995 
Acrylic on cotton mounted on canvas 
120 x 110 cm 
Takahashi Collection 
© Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Yoshitomo Nara Foundation

Childhood

Overseas

Return to Japan

Great East Japan Earthquake

In the Museum

Video about The Exhibition

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

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VIRTUAL TOUR

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His work is widely recognized for its bold, cartoon-like images of children with

Yoshitomo Nara | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Anthony McCall: Split Second

Opening Talk

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Museum’s program devoted to artistic practices of the moving image, the Film &amp; Video Gallery will host the radically abstract, film-based work of Anthony McCall (b. 1946, St. Paul's Cray, UK). Characteristic and always enigmatic, the work of this British-born, New York-based artist characteristically generates sculptural phenomena by means of cinematic projections, though it can also be perceived from the perspective of drawing expanded in space or light art.
Since in the 1970s up to the present day, McCall has produced his installations around the idea of “solid light,” a concept referring to the volume effects generated by the controlled projection of planes of light in the exhibition space, producing shapes that hypnotically and intangibly move throughout the darkness of the gallery. In clear dialogue with the works of Richard Serra and Lucio Fontana in the Museum Collection, this exhibition will feature the premier of a single new work, titled Split Second (Mirror) IV (2024), alongside the historic projection piece Miniature in Black and White (1972) and a series of photographic prints.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
Anthony McCall 
Face to Face, 2018 
Exhibition view at the Hepworth Wakefield, United Kingdom, 2018 
Photo: Darren O’Brien/Guzelian Pictures. Courtesy the artist

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Museum’s program devoted to artistic practices of the moving image, the Film &amp; Video Gallery will host the

Anthony McCall: Split Second | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

3nd floor

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

Iberdrola

In 1906, Hilma af Klint (b. Stockholm 1862; d. 1944) embarked upon the most ambitious, ground-breaking project of her career, the Paintings for the Temple. Over nearly a decade, she created 193 paintings and drawings, many of which were like little that came before. Bold, colorful, and often untethered from references to the visible world, these works explore forces and structures that af Klint believed were hidden to the eyes. In making these works, af Klint set aside the conventions of the Swedish academic tradition, and instead looked to the scientific and the spiritual currents of her day. Incorporating ideas and imagery from these two areas, while forging her own unique artistic vocabulary, af Klint established herself a pioneer in representing the invisible.
As af Klint made her way as an artist, she was living through profound social changes, including women’s rights movements. Despite the limitations placed on women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, af Klint was able to study at Royal Academy of Fine Arts and went on to exhibit her more traditional figurative works, but she also had to struggle to devote herself freely to art. In a context where women artists were commonly thought to be capable only of copying, not innovating, she rarely presented her more radical, abstract art publicly and struggled to find an audience who appreciated it. Undeterred, she painstakingly edited, saved, and catalogued her work so it would be preserved for future audiences, and stipulated that it not be exhibited until two decades after her death, when she believed the world would finally be ready to understand what she had produced. Ultimately, it would take even longer. Although her art was finally shown in 1986, forty-two years after her death, it would take decades more before her extraordinary legacy finally earned the recognition it deserves.
This exhibition presents a survey of the Swedish artist’s career. In addition to 110 works from the essential Paintings for the Temple, it also showcases her early more conventional creations, the automatic drawings she made with her spiritualist group The Five, her geometrically inflected series from the years after the Paintings for the Temple, and her later watercolors and sketchbooks.
Gallery: Second floor 
Curators: Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Lucía Agirre, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
 
Hilma af Klint 
Group VI, Evolution, No. 16, The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series 
(Grupp VI, Evolutionen, nr 16, Serie WUS/Sjustjärnan), 1908 
Oil on canvas 
102 x 133 cm 
Courtesy The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm, HaK 84 
©The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Bilbao 2024

Hilma af Klint

In 1906, Hilma af Klint (b. Stockholm 1862; d. 1944) embarked upon the most ambitious, ground-breaking project of her career, the Paintings for the

Hilma af Klint | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Surveying twenty-five years of the multi-disciplinary practice of Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom will celebrate a pioneering artist known for his incisive work that interrogates ideas of spectacle, belonging and difference. Inspired by televised sporting events and popular entertainment, Pfeiffer’s work deconstructs our fascination and obsession with celebrity culture, unpacking how collective consciousness is shaped and manipulated through his masterful editing of found footage. In tracing the global trajectory of image circulation, Pfeiffer demonstrates how desire, heroism and worship operate as part of the mechanisms of art, religion, politics, and nationhood.
From era-defining early videos to recent, genre-breaking works in photography, installation, and sculpture, the exhibition establishes Pfeiffer as one of today's most influential artists. His signature works on LCD monitors and miniature projectors, including Fragments of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999), John 3:16 (2000), and The Long Count (2000–01) trilogy, are joined by large-scale projections and immersive installations, such as The Saints (2007), an audio-visual recreation of the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany and Red Green Blue (2022), the artist’s most recent video work. This exhibition also marks the debut of newly-commissioned sculptures in Pfeiffer’s ongoing Incarnator series made in collaboration with “encarnadores” (from the Latin word meaning ‘“to make into flesh”), sculptors working in the Philippines, Spain and Mexico. Here, Pfeiffer casts the popstar Justin Bieber in the likeness of Jesus Christ, transforming him into a religious icon. The production of these sculptures links sixteenth-century colonial trade routes to present day global networks.
This is the artist’s first U.S. retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presentation will be the artist’s largest European survey.
Galleries: 103 and 105 
Venues: MOCA, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
 
Paul Pfeiffer 
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07), 2002 
Digital duraflex print 
121.9 x 152.4 cm 
© Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Perrotin; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

Surveying twenty-five years of the multi-disciplinary practice of Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

12€ Adults - 6€ Senior - 6€ 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.
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Exhibitions

Yoshitomo Nara

06.28.2024 - 11.03.2024

Anthony McCall: Split Second

06.19.2024 - 11.10.2024

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

01.24.2023 - 12.31.2024

Exhibitions

upcoming

Hilma af Klint

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

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