Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

This presentation of the Museum 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 featuring some of the Collection’s most outstanding pieces allows the original configuration of the building to be revealed as fully as possible by removing architectural elements that were added over the years. The show is also a celebration 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 Cristina Iglesias, 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 rooms 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

Galleries: third floor
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller

Source: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao