There is a wealth of art covering multiple disciplines to be experienced at the Guggenheim Bilbao including an epic new immersive installation created by Turkish AI artist Refik Anadol in homage to Frank Gehry, a major retrospective of Brazilian Modernist Tarsila do Amaral, an exhibition dedicated to Hawaiian multi-media artist Paul Pfeiffer, Richard Serra’s sculptural masterpiece The Matter of Time, and Yayoi Kusama’s acclaimed Infinity Mirrored Room.
Here are six Culturalee picks to see at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
in situ: Refik Anadol
This exhibition marks the launch of in situ, a new series dedicated to site-specific installations that push the boundaries of contemporary practices. Bringing together artists whose work spans visual art, technology, music, and performance, in situ explores new ways of perceiving and inhabiting space.
in situ: Refik Anadol presents Living Architecture: Gehry, a groundbreaking audiovisual installation that reimagines Frank Gehry’s architectural legacy through artificial intelligence (AI) and generative art. Developed by Refik Anadol Studio, the custom-built AI model Large Architecture Model (LAM) is based on advanced technology and has been trained for months on a vast archive of open-access imagery, sketches, and blueprints to transform Gehry’s architectural language into ever-changing landscapes of dynamic form, colour, and movement. Augmenting this visual spectacle is an immersive soundscape composed by Kerim Karaoglu, blending AI-generated audio with material recordings captured within the Museum itself.
Tarsila do Amaral: Painting Modern Brazil
A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (also known as Tarsila) created an original, evocative body of work, drawing on indigenous and popular imagery and on modernizing forces of a rapidly transforming country.
In the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila ferried between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals. Having constructed a “Brazilian” iconographic world, put to the test by the Cubism and Primitivism so in vogue in the French capital at the time, her painting was the root of the Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagic movements, whose search for an “authentic,” multicultural, and multiracial Brazil aimed to refound the country’s relationship with the European “centers” of colonization.
Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom
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 skilfully 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.
Richard Serra: The Matter of Time (1994–2005)
The Matter of Time allows the viewer to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculptural forms, from the relative simplicity of a double ellipse to the complexity of a spiral. The last two pieces of this sculpture are created from sections of toruses and spheres that produce different effects on the movement and perception of the viewer. These are unexpectedly transformed as the visitor walks through and around them, creating an unforgettable, dizzying feeling of space in motion. The entire room is part of the sculptural field. As he has done in other sculptures composed of many pieces, the artist has arranged the works deliberately in order to move the viewer through them and through the space surrounding them. The layout of the works along the gallery creates corridors with different, always unexpected proportions (wide, narrow, long, compressed, high, low). The installation also includes a progression in time. On the one hand, there is the chronological time that it takes to walk through and observe it from beginning to end. On the other, there is the time during which the viewer experiences the fragments of visual and physical memory, which are combined and re-experienced.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe
This room presents Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe (2020), a work by the Japanese artist and writer Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, Nagano, 1929) that is included in the exhibition Sections/Intersections. 25 Years of the Collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, organized as part of the celebrations of the institution’s 25th Anniversary.
Kusama is a unique voice who has been rediscovered by art historians and restored to the prominence that is hers by right. A leading pioneer of contemporary creativity, she envisages art as a means of social change, and to this end makes use of performance, painting, drawing, sculpture, literature, and her well-known immersive installations, the Infinity Mirror Rooms.
The artist started to work on the characteristic motifs of her production at an early age as a result of the hallucinations she suffered. Her work was soon inundated with patterns and reiterations, and after her arrival in New York in the late 1950s, these first found expression in her Infinity Nets, large monochromatic paintings that were gradually to expand until they occupied walls and then whole rooms from floor to ceiling.
With Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe, one of the last works produced by an artist now in her nineties, we are drawn once more into an immersive experience. The space projects Kusama’s hallucinations, making us participants in her obsessive universe and transmitting the need for “self-obliteration” by inviting us to disappear in the vibrant and unique interplay of coloured lights that multiply limitlessly on the mirrored walls of this infinite room.
