The Guggenheim honors its collection to celebrate its 25 years

The inauguration of the exhibition Sections/Intersections 25 Years of the Museum Collection has put the finishing touch to the celebrations for the celebrated anniversary of the art gallery, which has had Frank Gehry, the museum's architect, in the spotlight and that a few hours before the presentation had organized a gala dinner with 450 guests.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
18 October 2022 Tuesday 20:39
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The Guggenheim honors its collection to celebrate its 25 years

The inauguration of the exhibition Sections/Intersections 25 Years of the Museum Collection has put the finishing touch to the celebrations for the celebrated anniversary of the art gallery, which has had Frank Gehry, the museum's architect, in the spotlight and that a few hours before the presentation had organized a gala dinner with 450 guests. The exhibition brings together the works that have defined the history of the museum around three themes and offers, for the first time, "a panoramic view of the collection that the Guggenheim Bilbao has acquired since its foundation until today".

The Bilbao museum has chosen, therefore, to honor its quarter century in Bilbao by showing off its own collection that has been growing and taking root over the years.

The exhibition aims to be "a large exhibition triptych" with three thematic axes: Marking history, on the third floor; Unfolding narratives, on the second floor; and material life, in the first. In addition, room 103 hosts an exceptional installation by Yayoi Kusama [October 19].

The objective of the exhibition, curated by Lekha Hileman Waitoller, Manuel Cirauqui, Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Lucía Agirre and Maite Borjabad, is to offer visitors the opportunity to “rediscover the works that have historically defined both the interior and exterior of the Museum ”.

The third floor of the museum has been organized around the theme Marcando la História. Frank Gehry's architecture dialogues with a selection of works that single out key moments in the history of art after the Second World War.

The rooms have been organized in such a way that some offer works by a single author, while in others artists "with similar concerns" converge. The first room is devoted to post-war abstraction in New York, linking the works of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Ellsworth Kelly.

Another of the rooms offers the opportunity to observe the evolution of abstract expression towards new languages ​​that developed in the 1960-1980 decades "through artists recognized for their experimentation with new materials, the incorporation of screen printing and the use of text in the artistic work. John Chamberlain, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke and Jean-Michel Basquiat find their space in this room.

For their part, Eduardo Chillida, Jorge Oteiza, Antoni Tàpies, Pablo Palazuelo, Cristina Iglesias and Juan Uslé share a meeting of “artists from different generations and different languages ​​who display shared concerns around space and materials”.

Another of the rooms brings together artists whose works have had "a constant interest in reflecting contemporary events in their respective times and use popular culture as raw material." James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Gilbert

The second floor, under the theme Unfolding narratives, brings together a selection of works by twenty artists made between 1957 and 2019, in media such as painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper and installation, offering an expansive vision of the paradigms of narrative and from various movements of the second half of the 20th century.

Christian Boltanski and Francesco Clemente, George Baselitz or Alex Katz provide specific installations with a large spatial scope and experiential dimension.

Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, for their part, experiment with materiality and notions of mythology, symbolism and history, while Yves Klein or Yoko Ono emphasize "performative and corporeal manifestations through theme, technique and material".

Miquel Barceló, Jenny Holzer, Abigail Lazkoz, Juan Luis Moraza, Juan Muñoz, Ernesto Neto, Javier Pérez, Antonio Saura, and Julian Schnabel also have their space in the display of narratives on this second floor.

Finally, on the first floor of the museum, the exhibition revolves around the theme Material life. “In recent decades, the progressive rise of information technologies has led artists of diverse generations and origins to reconsider the materiality of our world, emphasizing with their practice its tangible and irreducible reality. Through a selection of works belonging to the last fifty years of global art, the exhibition presents, almost like a landscape, the strength of this recognition that is also an inexhaustible reinvention”, they explain from the museum.

Works by Doris Salcedo, Gerhard Richter, Mona Hatoum, Richard Long, Asier Mendizabal, Susana Solano, Itziar Okariz and Rodney Graham converge in this part of the exhibition.

Also, thanks to a long-term loan to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the exhibition includes a work by the Japanese artist and writer Yayoi Kusama.

In Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe (2020), one of the artist's last works, Kusama introduces the visitor to an immersive experience. The room projects the artist's hallucinations, the need for "self-obliteration", and makes the public participate in her obsessive universe, inviting them to also disappear in its vibrant play of colored lights, which multiplies without limits on the walls. mirrors of an infinite room.

The exhibition also includes the installation outside the museum of emblematic and relevant sculptures in the 25 years that have passed since the Guggenheim landed in Bilbao.