Exhibition: Art of Our Time: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collections, The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, until January 25 (third floor) and May 3 2014 (first and second floors)
Sol LeWitt, Mural nº 831 (Formas geométricas) [Wall Drawing #831 (Geometric Forms)], 1997© Guggenheim Bilbao MuseoaThere are so many currents running through this show in Bibao that Frank Gehry’s famous museum is even more electrifying than usual. In this celebration of the Guggenheim's collections, it seems that every notable artistic genre is represented.
So there is expressionism, abstract expressionism and neo expressionism and all points in between. Obviously there is cubism, clearly surrealism, and in terms of abstraction there are one or two works by Kandinsky, whose musicality will stop you in your tracks.
The show covers all three floors of the Basque gallery. It is vast. But even so, it dwells on very few art historical moments. There are two major pieces of minimalism (by Robert Morris), one example of land art (Richard Long), a lone instance of arte povera (Jannis Kounellis).
With work spanning the globe over the past 100 years, there are few institutions which could mount a show with such ambition. Only few gaps appear in the holdings of Guggenheim worldwide; many works are from the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York; a contemporary tapestry by El Anatsui even comes from Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; and of course much of the show hasn’t had to leave Bilbao.
Eduardo Chillida, Lo profundo es el aire, 1996© Guggenheim Bilbao MuseoaIndeed, a few key works will be familiar to those who have already visited the museum. Bilbao Circle, by Long, and the 1988 Untitled installation, by Kounellis, have simply been moved from one gallery to another.
They now benefit from the natural light coming through the skylight in Gallery 303. In room 207 we find Georg Baselitz’s madcap painting sequence Mrs Lenin and the Nightingale, another work to have made a recent appearance.
The Art of Our Time plays with familiarity throughout. Paintings by Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Delaunay and Amedeo Modigliani are so typical they could be torn from an art history primer. But they can be seen here with work by lesser names such as Albert Gleizes or Lyonel Feininger, a pair of cubists whose appearance is revelatory.
Modern art from New York is anchored to its new context by their exhibition alongside important artists from this region.
Eduardo Chillida and Jorge Oteiza are both sculptors and both Basque. Each of them gets a discrete space here where you can enjoy their deconstructive metal sculptures in which outside and inside interlock in a style which echoes of the museum building itself.
Pop art is best represented, with, for starters, a vast array of One Hundred and Fifty Multicoloured Marilyns by Andy Warhol. It is set across from a no less monumental celebration of the US Space Program by James Rosenquist. The former adman’s fluorescent palette has not aged at all badly.
Large paintings are something of a motif here, in this cavernous museum with plenty of space to fill. On a poppy tip, there is a 10 metre long Robert Rauschenberg which could take you quarter of an hour to walk past.
Elsewhere, there are overwhelming works by Anselm Kiefer, an absorbing Mark Bradford, and a pair of evocative works by Julie Mehretu which suggest maps of a psychological interior.
Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1952–53© Guggenheim Bilbao MuseoaThe chronology of the show is best followed from the third floor down to the first. And the last two above-mentioned painters can be found on the first, the contemporary art galleries, in which there are relatively few household names.
This was always going to be the difficulty of staging a three-dimensional timeline of the art ‘of our time’. We just don’t know which of these artists will become the Paul Klees, Pabio Picassos, and Joan Mirós of the coming age.
You could also take issue with the lack of non-western artists presented in the first two floors. But the likes of Danh Vo, Mona Hatoum, Ai Weiwei in the contemporary galleries go some way to redress the balance.
So the story of recent art which emerges here is a European birth, an American adolescence, perhaps a German middle age with Kiefer and Joseph Beuys and, although pinpointing the exact moment of death might be debatable, we now have what you might call a global afterlife in the art world as it stands today.
It is worth noting that the best works here work with their unique context. Wall Drawing #831, by Sol Lewitt, features bold, sail-like slabs of colour which mould themselves to the curvaceous and gallery.
This may be one of hundreds of murals by the conceptual artist, but it is surely the first to reflect its location quite so well.
It seems no matter how many illustrious artists they can assemble in the Museo Guggenheim, the 1997 building retains a starring role, as the architecture of our time.
fonte: @edisonmariotti #edisonmariotti http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art504704-Museum-of-our-Time-Masterpieces-from-the-permanent-collection-at-the-Guggenheim