Past

Exhibitions

Consult everything you need to know about current and upcoming exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Exhibitions | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Past | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Paul Pfeiffer

Opening Talk

Audio guide map

Paul Pfeiffer 

Audio guide

The Pure Products Go Crazy

The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle)

Live Evil (Kuala Lumpur)

Morning After the Deluge

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Saints

Justin Bieber Torso

Paul Pfeiffer's artistic practice is distinguished by a profound inquiry into the nature of spectacle, identity, and the intricate mechanisms of image-making within contemporary culture. His oeuvre encompasses a diverse array of mediums, including video, photography, sculpture, and installation, which enables him to delve into the complexities of how images shape our perceptions and experiences.
At the core of Pfeiffer's work lies the manipulation of footage from sporting events, music concerts, and films, which he skillfully edits using early digital software. His creations often reflect on the dualities of veneration and objectification, particularly concerning global icons such as athletes and pop stars. This emphasis highlights the multifaceted roles these figures play within mass culture, drawing attention to the artificiality of media representations and prompting audiences to critically examine their own positions as consumers of such imagery.
Pfeiffer's installations frequently incorporate elements of scale, juxtaposing miniature and larger-than-life formats to disrupt the viewer's relationship with the artwork. This approach heightens awareness of their physical presence in relation to the spectacle. Additionally, his exploration of the architectural forms of stadiums and arenas serves as a critical lens through which he scrutinizes the collective experience of spectatorship. He reveals that these spaces transcend mere venues for entertainment; they are also arenas where societal and political identities are both defined and contested.
The exhibition Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom represents the artist's most extensive presentation in Europe, featuring approximately thirty works that span his prominent career and affirm his status as one of today's most influential artists. This exhibition, which starts in this gallery and continues in gallery 103 also located on this floor, highlights his evolution by presenting iconic pieces that draw upon the dramatic narratives of sports and religion, alongside recent works that address colonial legacies and the complexities of identity. Ultimately, this show not only celebrates Pfeiffer's era-defining contributions to contemporary art but also provides a critical framework for examining the intricate themes of identity, belonging, and the pervasive influence of celebrity culture, underscoring the relevance of his work in our media-saturated society.
Exhibition organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Galleries: 105 and 103
Paul Pfeiffer 
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07), 2000/24 
Matte C-print 
146.3 x 182.9 cm 
Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer 
© 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

Architecture of the Masses

About Pfeiffer’s Practice

Video about The Exhibition

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

START

VIRTUAL TOUR

Paul Pfeiffer's artistic practice is distinguished by a profound inquiry into the nature of spectacle, identity, and the intricate mechanisms of

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

Hilma af Klint

Iberdrola

Gallery 205

The Beginnings

Spiritual Drawings, The Five (1896–1908)

Primordial Chaos (1906–07)

Eros (1907)

Gallery 206

Large Figure Paintings (1907)

Gallery 207

The Seven-Pointed Star (1908)

Evolution (1908)

Gallery 209

The Ten Largest (1907)

Gallery 203

The Dove (1915)

Altarpieces and Closing Painting (1915)

Gallery 202

The Parsifal Series and The Atom Series (1916–17)

Geometric Series and Watercolors (1920–22)

Galley 204

Tree of Knowledge (1913)

Gallery 208

The Swan (1915)

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

Spiritual beliefs and theosophy. Gateways to spiritual worlds

Scientific developments. Behind the forces of matter

Women’s voice. From the dark room to public speaking

Figurative and abstract artworks. Observation and invention

Chronology

In the Museum

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

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

Yoshitomo Nara

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

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.

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

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

“We can learn a lot from nature, plants, and animals if we look carefully. For instance, we can become aware of the time it takes for living beings to develop and grow&#8230;”
Elssie Ansareo

Artists

Elssie Ansareo

“La Arboleda is a place where one’s presence and interaction with the environment can be felt differently&#8230;&#8221;

Ibon Garagarza

“What an amazing time we have had this year! The students and teachers’ involvement set the project’s pace&#8230;&#8221;

Zaloa Ipiña

“Exploring the intersection between the history of art and food was the backbone of our art project this year&#8230;&#8221;

Nerea Lekuona

“My work as an educator and my activity as an artist sometimes overlap. Educational art projects are a fine way of exploring my art interests and concerns in a different light&#8230;&#8221;

Maider López

&#8220;This project drew on art-specific concepts and methods, like symbolism, abstraction, or metaphor, to take a different look at the world&#8230;&#8221;

Manu Muniategi

Learning Through Art

10 students, 5th and 6th grade, Escolapios Calasanz School, Vitoria-Gasteiz

Art You Can Eat

16 students, 1st to 6th grade, La Arboleda School, Trápaga

Traces of the Past and the Future

21 students, 2nd grade, Artatse School, Bilbao

Landscapes That Come to Life

21 students, 2nd grade, Eretza Berri School, Sodupe

Nature in Transformation

17 students, 5th and 6th grade, Manuela Zubizarreta School, Etxebarria

Taking Care of the Vegetable Garden

13 students, 6th grade, Katalin Erauso School, Donostia-San Sebastián

What We Have in Common

Learning Through Art is an educational program that uses a unique method, resorting to art as a tool to deal with elementary school curriculum content. During the 2023–2024 school year, six Museum artists embarked on this creative adventure with schoolchildren from six different schools, working with them along twenty sessions. Their art projects addressed topics such as the importance of healthy eating habits, the search for connections between people, or the development of fresh looks at nature and the environment. The children used video, painting, photography, and sculpture to explore and understand reality, and to develop collaboration skills, creativity, and imagination. They were encouraged to get involved in their own creative processes, to think, assess, make choices, try, have doubts, have fun, get lost, and, of course, make mistakes—for there can be no progress without mistakes.
Learning Through Art culminates in a presentation of the school projects at the Museum. This year, the processes and changes in the natural world, local identity, common good and individuality, and the importance of care were some of the subjects that inspired the schoolchildren’s work. Outside the gallery, a video shows the creative process throughout the school year, summarizing the path taken by each school group.
The exhibition of the schoolchildren’s projects at the Museum is the program’s closure, showing the work done over several months. At the exhibition, visitors can find unexpected, original, fresh points of view, explore inspiring ideas, and share in the children’s excitement about discovery and creation. The Museum’s Art Program often invites reflection on the environment. Thus, the exhibition Learning Through Art is in line with the Museum’s sustainability goal regarding the materials used and the subjects of many of the topics presented.

Exchange Project

IN THE MUSEUM

Learning Through Art 2024

Learning Through Art is an educational program that uses a unique method, resorting to art as a tool to deal with elementary school curriculum content.

Learning Through Art 2024 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Martha Jungwirth

Interview to the artist and to the curator

Occident

205. Objects and People

206. Travel Escapes

207. Animals as Imagery

209. Art History

Martha Jungwirth (b. 1940, Vienna) has likened her artworks to a diary that traces her physical engagement with the creative process. She sees her drawings and paintings as dynamic extensions of herself, where intelligent structures of lines and blotches emerge, propelled by her emotions and movements. Jungwirth’s art is a study in fluidity, transparency, and openness, shunning the pursuit of the noble to delve into the raw, the uncensored, and the unembellished.
Jungwirth's work exists in a conversational realm between memory and representation, translating personal experiences into visual forms that are deeply individual perceptions. Through colors that carry emotional weight and gestural forms that only hint at their origins, Jungwirth’s paintings defy easy categorization, oscillating between abstraction and subtle representational elements. This artistic spectrum ranges from paintings filled with dense strokes to those marked by spare brushwork, exploring the tension between abstraction and the physical world.
Jungwirth’s early work demonstrates a distinct approach to the visceral and the subjective characterized by a fusion of Abstract Expressionism and a raw, emotive quality, setting the stage for the development of her unique aesthetic. Her oeuvre is marked by a continuous evolution, engaging with a variety of themes, from introspective self-portraits to landscapes to responses to contemporary global events, such as the 2019–20 Australian bushfires.
This exhibition presents 70 works, starting with Jungwirth’s earliest drawings that explore the boundary between representation and abstraction, and concludes with her recent series inspired by Francisco de Goya and Édouard Manet. Organized thematically, it features drawings, watercolors, oil paintings, and artist books on a variety of substrates, including handmade paper, accounting books, cardboard, and more. These unconventional materials introduce unpredictability into Jungwirth’s creative process, enhancing the spontaneity and dynamism of her work. Her dedication to thematic exploration and visual innovation highlights her distinctive stance in the art world, as she persistently challenges and extends the limits of her artistic expression.
Galleries: 205, 206, 207 and 209 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Martha Jungwirth 
Maja I, from the series Francisco de Goya, Maja 
(Maja I, aus der Serie Francisco de Goya, Maja), 2021 
Oil on paper over canvas 
238.8 x 299.6 cm x 2.7 cm 
Brauner Collection 
© Martha Jungwirth, Bilbao, 2024 
Photo: Sebastiano Pellion

Martha Jungwirth, gesture and color

After the great masters

In the study of Jungwirth in Viena

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

Martha Jungwirth (b. 1940, Vienna) has likened her artworks to a diary that traces her physical engagement with the creative process. She sees her

Martha Jungwirth | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

June Crespo. Vascular

Introductory artist conversation

June Crespo

The sculptural practice of June Crespo (b. Pamplona, 1982) is purposefully situated at the intersection of multiple pathways and contemporary lines of research. It engages in a transformative dialogue with the concepts that have shaped Basque art in recent decades—namely, “moving pairs” such as abstraction and gesture, the tragic and the opaque, lightness and strangeness. It also takes on certain pressing issues that have only recently been included within the broader debates, in particular with respect to feminist sensibilities and awareness of the devastation caused by modern lifestyles on the natural environment, now entirely subject to the cycles of industrial and post-industrial production and reproduction, amid the pressures of the Anthropocene.
Crespo’s practice has long had a living, active materiality, right up to the present day, and this character forms the very basis of Vascular, the exhibition presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The idea is to offer a new perspective on Crespo’s practice while inviting her, at the same time, to explore an unprecedented scale in her work. Crespo’s sculptures bring together and combine a wide range of diverse parts—molds of plants, clothes or found textiles, construction elements, concrete casts, magazines. By radically assembling them or changing their scale, they emphasize the stark contrast between the lived material and the structural elements that close off and channel our existence, be they ducts, metal sheets, molds, or formwork. Stems are then connected to them, or bits of textile or paper get trapped in their joints, while traces of technical operations, erosions, and accidents can be read in them as well. Bound by lashing straps, or simply resting upon each other, these elements appear to ceaselessly interrogate one another.
Along with a selection of pieces from the last seven years, Vascular features new and extraordinary work that combines recurring forms, gestures, and questions that are present in many of Crespo’s previous series. Examples of this include the sculptural or even architectural use of photographs, which become large-scale floor prints, or the presentation of structures used in industrial production or in building, such as work tables or raising platforms which serve to hold up the proliferation of vegetal forms, tubes, and cylinders in the gallery space. Vascular seeks to point out the internal communication within each of Crespo’s pieces and suggest transmissions between all the works included in the exhibition, which act like communicating vessels and capillary networks, both in terms of their material relations and the scarifications and marks that the artist incorporates on the surface of the sculpture.
Gallery: 105 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
June Crespo 
Vascular (5), 2024 
Curved checker steel plate and rugs 
150 × 300 × 293 cm 
Courtesy the artist 
© June Crespo, Bilbao, 2024 
Image © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. Photo Erika Barahona Ede

Biography

Video

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

The sculptural practice of June Crespo (b. Pamplona, 1982) is purposefully situated at the intersection of multiple pathways and contemporary lines of

June Crespo. Vascular | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Online Art Course: Film & Video, moving image as an Artistic Medium

Metahaven: Chaos Theory

Audio guide: Metahaven

Opening Talk: Metahaven

Founded by Dutch artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007, Metahaven is a renowned artist collective whose work blurs the boundaries of art, filmmaking and design. Encompassing a broad variety of mediums including moving images, exhibition design, graphics, digital interfaces, and theory, Metahaven is regarded today as a visionary agent in the advancement of post-digital, critical culture.
Metahaven's recent film piece, Chaos Theory (2021), is an enthralling audiovisual poem structured around the dialogues and wanderings of two characters: X (Valentina Di Mondo) and Y/Z (Georgina Dávid), as they reflectively confront the contemporary world and its puzzling flows of interconnected phenomena. Avoiding the use of conventional narrative language and the binaries of information technology, Chaos Theory operates as a non-linear tale challenging the divisions between fiction and fact, shared realities and dreams. Shot on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the movie's landscape appears in contrast with its dreamlike scenes and the open-ended poetics of its dialogues. Likewise, the newly-conceived installation of this work spatially challenges the limits of the film screen by means of a large textile work that expands in the Museum's main gallery. This textile echoes some of the graphic patterns and objects that appear in the story, referencing data points and graphic vectors blended into a thick texture and color coding that is reminiscent of common upholstery motives in public transit.
Metahaven’s video installation is paired with a multiplicity of embroidered objects, understood as film stills and documents from the artists' expanded visual research and on view in the anteroom. Thus the presentation of Chaos Theory is accompanied by a display of selected pieces from Metahaven's Arrows (2020) and Blossoms (2021) series, featuring an array of complex digital embroideries on found jumpsuit jackets, commercial plastic bags, and small tapestries that remind of fabric samples or doormats, alongside the textile and video triptych Living Together in Stories (2022). Juxtaposing oneiric landscapes, abstract graphics, and symbols from the organic world, the artists invite us to challenge our certainties and envision a future defined by empathy, fluid identity, and interdependence.
Galleries: 103 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
Metahaven 
Chaos Theory (2021) 
Single channel film, 25 min. (film still) 
Courtesy the artists

Founded by Dutch artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007, Metahaven is a renowned artist collective whose work blurs the boundaries of art,

Metahaven: Chaos Theory | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

15€ Adults - 7.5€ Senior - 7.5€ Students

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