Women on Tour for Families
Welcome to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao!
Grab your chance to visit this amazing building, which houses extraordinary works of art. All of the pieces in this tour are by female artists—talented and adventurous like explorers!
Is Maman a spider?
Exterior next to the footbridge
Enter the Museum. Once in the Atrium, go to the balcony. From there, you will be able to see a giant spider that seems to be moving forward.
Louise Bourgeois was always trying new materials to make sculptures and devising ways to make works that seem to threaten and protect the viewer at once. Maman is a colossal bronze spider balancing on slender legs.
Why is this sculpture called Maman, the French word for “mum”? Does it look like a mum at all? It is a tribute to Louise Bourgeois’s mother, who wove tapestries just like spiders weave their webs!
When you exit the Museum, make your way to Maman, walk underneath it, and look up. What can you see? Why do you think Bourgeois made it like that?
Louise Bourgeois
Maman, 1999
Bronze, marble, and stainless steel
927 x 891 x 1023 cm
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Make a wish
Level 2 terrace
Yoko Ono is a Japanese artist with many interests: art, film, music… And she conceives of them as experiments or explorations.
Ono is also a peace activist and an advocate of women’s rights and human rights.
Wish Tree for Bilbao is a work for world peace, and you can be part of it. On certain days, you can make a wish, write it down, and place it on the tree. When the tree is not available for written prayers, you can just whisper your wish.
Come on! Make a wish!
Yoko Ono
Wish Tree for Bilbao, 1996/2014
Handwritten framed text, olive tree, soil, wooden pot, lectern, labels, and pens
Dimensions variable
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Bright colors!
Gallery 305, level 3
Lee Krasner was an American painter who worked hard in her formative years to become an artist.
She was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement that focused on the expression of feelings and emotions rather than the depiction of real-life objects.
Krasner was always thinking of new forms of painting. In her later years, she used gestural brushstrokes and vibrant colors. Just as in Palingenesis!
About the title: do you know the meaning of the word “palingenesis”? Of Greek origin, this word translates as “being born again”. What do you think Krasner meant by titling her painting Palingenesis? How do you feel about its colors and brushstrokes?
Lee Krasner
Palingenesis, 1971
Oil on canvas
208.3 x 340.4 cm
Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York
How many faces can you see?
Gallery 303, level 3
Andy Warhol used images of everyday objects—cleaning products, foods, and so on—and celebrities in his paintings.
Here, Warhol painted American actress, model, and singer Marilyn Monroe, a very popular and very brave woman who became an icon of American popular culture.
In One Hundred and Fifty Multicolored Marilyns, Monroe’s face appears no less than one hundred and fifty times! How is this achieved? With silkscreen printing, a technique where a mesh is used to transfer ink onto a surface, thus copying previously drawn images.
Andy Warhol
One Hundred and Fifty Multicolored Marilyns
1979
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
201 x 1055 x 6 cm
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Now you see me, now you don’t
Gallery 301, level 3
Cristina Iglesias’s sculptures are large, but they have been designed with people in mind, as she likes her works to be “inhabited” by the viewers and produce certain sensations in them.
Celosía, the work’s title in Spanish, refers to a lattice placed on a window.
Just imagine how things must look when looking at them from inside the sculpture!
Cristina Iglesias
Untitled (Jealousy II)
1997
Wood, resin, and bronze powder
274 x 270 x 251.5 cm
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Blah, blah, blah
Level 3 balcony
Jenny Holzer uses language as a means of artistic expression. Her works include short messages against war and injustice, or phrases that reflect her thoughts and feelings.
Holzer displays her messages using eye-catching mediums, such as electronic display screens, large-scale projections, digital signs on trucks, and even cold white marble benches.
Come to the balcony. Watch your step! Ask an adult to download the app for Like Beauty in Flames on their cellphone.
Holzer uses augmented reality to make a work of art that enters in dialogue with the building from different points located inside the Museum and also outside; you can even get a third experience of the work from anywhere in the world!
Jenny Holzer
Like Beauty in Flames, 2021
Augmented Reality app
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
This is the end of this tour, where you had the chance to see some works created by some of the leading women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sure, you will know more of them in the future!
We hope you enjoyed the tour and learned a few interesting things along the way. Hope to see you again soon!
