Inside the building, skylight | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

A day at the Museum

Have an unforgettable experience at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, visiting the exhibitions and taking a look at the building’s stuning architectural features.

Explore the educational areas in each exhibition, where you will find a variety of tools including texts and reading sections, interactive software, videos, audio files, images, illustrations, and graphic resources. They will make your experience much more rewarding!

* Scan the QR codes in the galleries to get the audio guides on your mobile phone for a most enjoyable tour.

Barbara Kruger
Kruger

Barbara Kruger

The second floor of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has been dramatically transformed for the solo exhibition dedicated to conceptual artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945, New Jersey), a leading figure of the American art scene for the past fifty years. Using language as a creative tool, Kruger invites us to think about gender, identity, rights, and freedoms. With the direct involvement of the artist in the conception and design of this survey, Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. features her words, printed on colossal vinyl installations that cover some of the Museum floors and lead us through the exhibition. The walls also display her play of images and texts that literally places viewers in the center of her art.

In gallery 205, you will find references to Kruger’s earliest and most iconic works. Back in the 1980s, she took up the visual strategies of advertising in an effort to make us question and think. Some of her works have been adapted into Spanish or Basque, thus bringing them closer to local audiences. In addition, in this exhibition Kruger’s ideas take on new, digital forms, delivering a different visual experience, in sync with the digital era they belong to. Gallery 209, for instance, includes her LED panels with texts, voices, and moving images.

Before leaving the exhibition, take a look at the Didaktika gallery 201, for an overview of Kruger’s interventions in public spaces like parks and on everyday objects, such as album covers, t-shirts, and metro tickets, making her art accessible and conveying her messages through less formal or institutional channels. And if you pay attention during your visit, you may discover how Kruger’s art continues to resonate in the most unexpected places.

Barbara Kruger
Untitled (FOREVER), 2017
Print on vinyl wallpaper
Dimensions variable
Installation view, FOREVER, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, September 16, 2017–January 20, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers

Zero
Sala ZERO | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Zero

Lobby

We suggest you start your tour of the Museum at ZERO, an immersive experience with a powerful visual language and an amazing design.

Located in the lobby, ZERO welcomes all visitors with a sensory approach to the history of the Museum and its environs, to the Frank Gehry–designed building, and to the Museum Collection.

Atrium
Interior del edificio, Atrio | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Atrium

1st floor, Atrium

The Atrium is the beating heart of the building, connecting the interior to the exterior. The walkways pumping visitors into or out of it offer new standpoints to observe the artwork on view.

The Matter of Time
La Materia del Tiempo | Richard Serra | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

The Matter of Time

1st floor, gallery 104

You can experience and activate time and space by wondering about The Matter of Time, an installation by Richard Serra (1994-2005).

Originally designed for gallery 104, this series of seven monumental sculptures posed a huge challenge in terms of both manufacturing and installation. The sculptures were impossibly heavy and yet quite fragile, being made of towering weathering steel sheets. It took state-of-the-art technology to make them.

At the far end of the gallery, there is an educational area where you can find scale models of the works on display and a video showing how they were installed, among other resources. Make sure not to miss it!

Richard Serra
The Matter of Time , 1994–2005
Weathering Steel
Dimensions variable
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Site-specific Works (Museum interior)
instalacion para bilbao holzer red

Site-specific Works (Museum interior)

1st floor, Atrium

Standing in dialogue with the interior and the exterior of the building designed by Frank Gehry, site-specific works by contemporary artists make a significant part of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection.

In gallery 101, by the Atrium, take a look at Jenny Holzer’s Installation for Bilbao (1997).

Jenny Holzer
Installation for Bilbao , 1997
Electronic LED sign
Site-specific dimensions
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Bar Guggenheim Bilbao
terraza bar 2

Bar Guggenheim Bilbao

Plaza

If you need a break or a snack, go to the Bar Guggenheim Bilbao, next to the Bistró, in the Museum plaza.

Museum Exterior
El gran árbol y el ojo | Anish Kapoor | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Museum Exterior

1st floor, terrace

From the riverfront terrace you can see how the Museum is seamlessly integrated into the surrounding cityscape in terms of materials (glass, titanium, limestone) and how it connects with the surrounding buildings and structures.

The pond pays tribute to the Nervión estuary and its fundamental role in the development of the city of Bilbao. It also makes the perfect setting for artwork by Anish Kapoor and Yves Klein.

Going out from the Atrium, walk into the terrace and discover the works by Eduardo Chillida and also by Louise Bourgeois. You can also take a look at the pieces by Fujiko Nakaya, Daniel Buren, and Yves Klein, also installed outside, which are operated to become active at regular intervals.

Anish Kapoor
Tall Tree & The Eye , 2009
Stainless steel and carbon steel
1297 x 442 x 440 cm
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection
Sol-LeWitt

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

3rd floor

The third floor houses Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection, a journey through some of the leading art movements in the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, including works by renowned artists like Cristina Iglesias, Sol LeWitt, or Mark Rothko belonging to the Museum Collection.

The galleries on this floor had their skylights reopened for this exhibition, thus going back to their original designs.

 

Restaurants
Interior del restaurante Nerua | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Restaurants

Restaurants

The Museum affords two spaces with different culinary experiences: Nerua Guggenheim Bilbao, an haute cuisine restaurant, and the Bistró Guggenheim Bilbao, a restaurant wrapped in a more informal atmosphere.

Store-Bookstore
tienda guggenheim

Store-Bookstore

1st floor

The Museum Store/Bookstore offers a wide range of items, including design objects, exhibition catalogues, books, and all kinds of gifts. Discounts available for Museum Members. You can also buy from home visiting our online Store.

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules
Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules

04.11.2025–09.28.2025

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, in gallery 105, is an exhibition focusing on one of the leading figures of American abstract art in the twentieth century: Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011). Structured to mirror the stages in her life and artistic career, the exhibition shows how Frankenthaler’s free, boundless creativity opened up new avenues for abstract painting.

The exhibition begins in the 1950s, when the young artist, inspired by Jackson Pollock, popularized a new painting technique: soak-stain, which involves pouring thinned-down paint onto a flat, unprimed canvas, allowing the paint to soak into the fabric and create soft, fluid washes of color. In the 1960s, her paintings become clearer and more structured, as shown in the big canvas where color seems to float at its own pace. In the 1970s and 1980s, her work becomes more lyrical and atmospheric, her landscapes – like Eastern Light (1982) – capturing light, calm, and the ocean.

The exhibition also follows her personal and creative ties with other artists, including Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, David Smith, and Anthony Caro, whose works are shown as well. Frankenthaler shared ideas, friendship, and admiration with them all. In her final years, Frankenthaler’s works on paper became more essential and intimate, as a response to her creative principle: painting without rules.

Helen Frankenthaler
Star Gazing, 1989
Acrylic on canvas
181.6 x 365.8 cm
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York
© 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP
Photo: Tim Pyle, courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York

Itineraries: in situ: Refik Anadol
Refik-Anadol

Itineraries: in situ: Refik Anadol

Living Architecture: Gehry

March 7–October 19, 2025

The exhibition in gallery 208 marks the launch of in situ, a new series of site-specific installations that push the boundaries of contemporary practices in dialog with the Museum’s architecture.

in situ: Refik Anadol presents Living Architecture: Gehry (2025), a groundbreaking audiovisual installation by Turkish-American media artist Refik Anadol, a pioneer in the aesthetics of data visualization and AI art. Anadol reimagines Frank Gehry’s architectural legacy in a unique immersive experience in which the latter’s designs are reinterpreted and reimagined with the help of AI.

Using a custom-built AI model developed by Refik Anadol Studio that feeds on a vast archive of ethically sourced, open-access imagery, sketches, and blueprints, Anadol explores machines’ ability to “dream”, transforming Gehry’s architectural language into ever-changing landscapes with stunning abstract configurations. Living Architecture: Gehry unfolds across six interconnected chapters, surrounding visitors within the walls of the vast gallery 208, challenging their perceptions, and encouraging them to think about the impact of AI on the future of creativity and the way in which we understand the world through technology.

In the Didaktika educational area in gallery 204, we will find audio and video resources that will help you understand the creative process behind Refik Anadol and his multidisciplinary team’s works.

Render for exhibition at Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2024
© Refik Anadol, Bilbao 2025

Vito Acconci / Sergio Prego: YOU
Prego

Vito Acconci / Sergio Prego: YOU

04.03.2025 – 09.07.2025

The Film & Video gallery, dedicated to video art and motion pictures, is currently housing the result of the convergence of Vito Acconci (New York, 1940–2017) and Sergio Prego (Donostia-San Sebastián, 1969), who met at Acconci Studio in New York, became friends, and worked together between 1996 and 2002.

Although they belonged to different generations, Acconci and Prego shared the idea that body action not only takes place in space but transforms space too. While the former was interested in everyday gestures, the latter focused on how sculpture interventions changed the spaces where they were set.

This itinerary begins in the hall of gallery 103, where Acconci’s sound piece Running Tape (1969) enters into a dialogue with several of Prego’s single-channel videos. The main gallery has been transformed into an immersive space thanks to a site-specific design by Prego. Visitors are encouraged to wander about, in an intertwining of architecture, image, and action where Acconci’s works are screened on the unusual surfaces of the installation.

Sergio Prego
Bisecting Line, 2008 (frame). Video, color, no sound, 3 min. 14 sec. Courtesy of the artist.