Past

Exhibitions

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

Exhibitions | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Sky Hopinka

Audio guide

Sky Hopinka explores Indigenous culture, history, and traditional beliefs through themes of identity, memory, language, and myth. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people of Southern California, Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, in the United States. The Pacific Northwest holds a special place in Hopinka’s artwork, especially as he delves into investigating notions of homeland, personhood, and landscape. In particular, his films reflect on the complexities of contemporary Indigenous life by blending non-narrative filmmaking, poetry, and abstract imagery with an ethnopoetic approach—a response against the ethnographic gaze that has long objectified Indigenous cultures in moving image.
Ethnopoetic cinema examines themes of cultural identity, displacement, and the everyday experience through a combination of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques, thereby emphasizing the artistic and performative aspects of cultural expression. At the core of Hopinka’s work is a profound commitment to storytelling through his Indigenous perspective, a narrative that has long been marginalized within the Western canon. He explains, “Part of the desire I had to make films was to tell Indigenous stories that were unique to my own community and my own identity.”
In Fainting Spells (2018), Hopinka explores the creation story of Xąwįska, or Indian Pipe Plant, also known as ghost flower or corpse plant. This medicinal flowering plant is traditionally used by the Ho-Chunk people to revive those who have fainted and is also emblematic of Indigenous identity, knowledge, and culture. Moreover, its symbolism can be linked to cycles of life and death, or a connection to the spiritual world. Although Hopinka could not unearth a myth for the plant to determine its origins through his extensive research, he instead created one to engage with and reclaim the practice of mythkeepers and mythmaking in his own Indigenous culture.
The three-channel short film begins with a handwritten poem that moves across scenes of expansive colorful landscape accompanied by lyrical music. The poem, which is also listed below, speaks to Xąwįska directly, who later appears personified as a cloaked figure, and leads viewers on a walk through the spirit world in different states of consciousness. Filmed in Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon, and New Mexico, Hopinka creates a dreamlike visual narrative by collaging together music, poetry, sound, color, and imagery into a unique immersive experience in this new edition created specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-534378 size-full" src="http://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07.jpg" alt="Sky hopinka" width="1920" height="1082" srcset="https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07.jpg 1920w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-300x169.jpg 300w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-1024x577.jpg 1024w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-768x433.jpg 768w, https://cms.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/uploads/2024/12/FS-HR-07-1536x866.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" />
Poem in Fainting Spells (2018)
Xąwįska, you’ve fainted again. 
I plucked a flower from your shoulder blade 
and rolled it between my fingers 
until it was a light gray mash. 
I lit it on fire and blew the smoke onto your face. 
As I waited for you to wake I thought of the times your laughter 
woke me from a daydream. 
What are these blue-greens, oranges and pinks? 
The swirling plume of smoke that begs you to rise? 
These questions I always meant to ask. 
When you finally rose, you blew the smoke out onto your hands 
and spoke of my mother.
Xąwįska, you’ve sat outside for too long. 
Night is falling and the spirits can see us. 
It’s time to go home. 
You had told me, “When you see the red oaks follow the water. 
Then, when you find a fork in the river 
there will be a lovely piece of land. 
Remove everything that shines from your hands, 
from your neck, from your body, 
and swim to the nearest shore.”
Xąwįska, you’ve fainted again. 
I tried to revive you, the way that I know. 
You never want to rise. You lay there, still. 
You taught me to sing the songs of our brothers 
so that our relatives will know who we are. 
“So loud will be our voices that they’ll reach the sky!” 
That is what you told me. That is what I remember.
Xąwįska, you’ve fallen again. I pluck flowers from your shoulder, 
your arm, your leg. 
I mash them up and set them ablaze. 
Xąwįska, you are so quiet. 
I am beside you and breathe a breath full of your smoke. 
Exhale onto you. 
You smolder and ash and collapse. 
I am alone again. 
I think of that place you once described, 
between the fork in the river with the oaks, 
as the sky turns red. 
I have stayed here up until now. 
For a long time I have remained here. 
Now, I myself will go wandering around the edge of encircling lake.
Gallery: 103 
Curator: Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
 
Sky Hopinka 
Fainting Spells, 2018 
Three-channel color video, with sound, 9 min., 45 sec. 
A.P. 1/2, edition of 3 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council, 2021 
© Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka's Biography

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells

Sky Hopinka explores Indigenous culture, history, and traditional beliefs through themes of identity, memory, language, and myth. A member of the Ho-Chunk

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Barbara Kruger

Opening Talk

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Occident

Gallery 205

Gallery 206

Gallery 207

Gallery 209

Gallery 203

Gallery 202

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the first comprehensive survey in Spain of American artist Barbara Kruger, whose bold, thought-provoking work has captivated audiences for over five decades. This expansive exhibition explores how Kruger harnesses the power of words and images to question the structures that shape our daily lives—identity, desire, truth, and control.
From the very beginning of her career, Kruger has challenged how language functions in the media, in politics, and in our own inner dialogues. Using concise, declarative phrases set in stark black and white text punctuated by either red or green, she draws from the visual language of advertising—but instead of selling products, her works demand critical thinking. Phrases like “Your body is a battleground” or “I shop therefore I am” have become cultural touchstones, raising urgent questions about gender, consumption, and power.
This exhibition brings together works from across her career—early paste-ups, large-scale vinyl texts, video installations, audio interventions, and site-specific pieces created especially for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. As one moves through the galleries, Kruger’s art unfolds across floors, walls, and screens, immersing visitors in a charged visual and sonic environment. Her work is not just something to look at—it is something to experience, to question, and to confront.
In dialogue with Bilbao’s own linguistic and cultural histories, Kruger has created work in Spanish and Basque that explores how language defines who we are and how we live together. As she puts it, “Language is a powerful force—and it defines us.”
At a time when information is constant and truth feels increasingly unstable, Kruger’s work encourages us to slow down, read closely, and think deeply. With wit, urgency, and visual precision, she reminds us that images speak—and so must we.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Barbara Kruger 
Untitled (Forever), 2017/2025. Digital print on vinyl wallpaper and floor covering. Installation view, Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, June 24–November 9, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers

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We’d like to invite you to enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. This tour includes all the works and didactic texts in the show.

Start

VIRTUAL TOUR

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the first comprehensive survey in Spain of American artist Barbara Kruger, whose bold, thought-provoking work has

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules

Fundación BBVA

Making Her Mark: 1950s

Riding the Tide: 1960s

Newfound Freedom: 1970s

Thresholds: 1980s

In Pursuit of Beauty: 1990s

Painting to Finish: 2000s

Among Friends

Invited to Make Sculpture

Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928; d. 2011), best known for her invention of the soak-stain technique, played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. A tireless experimenter over the course of six decades, the artist produced a prolific stream of paintings on canvas and paper, in addition to sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and print editions. Her innovative work, represented in the collections of major museums worldwide, continues to inspire contemporary artists.
Born in New York City, Frankenthaler studied studio art with Paul Feeley at Bennington College, in Vermont, before returning to Manhattan, where she gravitated to abstract art. By the early 1950s she had gained direct access to key figures in the New York School—icons of postwar American art—all of whom shared her unwavering commitment to experimentation, some of whom became part of her inner social circle.
Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules contextualizes the painter’s creative output through the lens of her artistic affinities, influences, and friendships. Comprising thirty of Frankenthaler’s poetic abstractions created between 1953 and 2002, the exhibition also features select paintings and sculptures by some of her contemporaries—Anthony Caro, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith—highlighting the synergies between these artists.
Painting Without Rules is designed chronologically, decade to decade, beginning with the 1950s and ending in the 2000s. Each section, paced by a curatorial text, represents another chapter of Frankenthaler’s prolific career. The exhibition celebrates the legacy of a pioneering artist who never stopped exploring new ways to make abstract art.
The exhibition is organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and it is curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné.
Gallery: 105
 
Helen Frankenthaler 
Moveable Blue, 1973 
Acrylic on canvas 
177.8 x 617.8 cm 
ASOM Collection 
© 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP 
Photo: © ASOM Collection

IN FOCUS Helen Frankenthaler

Chronology

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

START

Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928; d. 2011), best known for her invention of the soak-stain technique, played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

in situ: Refik Anadol

Exhibition Partner:

1of1

Technology Partner:

Euskaltel (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, color, 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.
Living Architecture: Gehry unfolds across six interconnected chapters, each representing a distinct stage in the evolution of data into architectural imagination:
<ul>
<li>Chapter I — Data Universe: A vast constellation of materials and data—archival photographs, plans, and structural documents—are compiled into a memory space.</li>
<li>Chapter II — Data Plotting: As the data is processed, complex patterns emerge through the arrangement of form, texture, and spatial composition.</li>
<li>Chapter III — Data Tunnel: The data transitions into immersive visual environments in the latent space, inviting viewers to engage with the evolving process of human-machine collaboration.</li>
<li>Chapter IV — Large Architecture Model: By transforming Gehry’s forms, the AI generates new architectural possibilities that push the boundaries of imagination and design.</li>
<li>Chapter V — Machine Hallucination: A moment of abstraction, where AI-generated structures break free from conventional spatial constraints, offering hallucinatory, dreamlike visions.</li>
<li>Chapter VI — Dreams: A return to the world of architecture, now envisioned through the limitless imagination of AI—where architecture transforms in real time, continuously generating new forms that emerge and evolve in the moment.</li>
</ul>
As the inaugural exhibition of in situ series, Living Architecture: Gehry exemplifies the way Anadol explores the future of site-specific, AI-driven art, where data becomes material and space becomes an evolving canvas of memory, form, and imagination.
Built upon ethically sourced data and powered by sustainable computing practices, the installation reflects a conscientious approach to digital creation, where innovation and responsibility go hand in hand.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Refik Anadol Studio 
Installation view of Living Architecture: Gehry at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 
© Refik Anadol, Bilbao 2025

The Process Behind Living Architecture: Gehry

This exhibition marks the launch of in situ, a new series dedicated to site-specific installations that push the boundaries of contemporary practices.

in situ: Refik Anadol | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

3rd floor

Due to a change in the exhibition, some galleries on the third floor will be closed until November 7th. 
To find out which works from the Collection are currently on display, please see the <a href="https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/the-collection/works">following link</a>, where you will find details of each one.
This presentation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 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, which features some of the Collection’s most outstanding pieces, also showcases the original architecture of the building. The installation celebrates 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 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 galleries 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, Marta Blàvia

If Walls Could Talk…

El Anatsui

Jenny Holzer

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

Due to a change in the exhibition, some galleries on the third floor will be closed until November 7th. To find out which works from the Collection are

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born into an affluent family in Lisbon on June 13, 1908. Her father died when she was only 2 years old, and her mother was left to raise her with the support of her family. As she grew up, Vieira da Silva was exposed to art and theater, and developed a taste for music that had a lasting impact on her. She studied painting and drawing at the Escola de Belas-Artes in Lisbon and in 1928 she moved to Paris to continue her training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she met her future husband, Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes. They lived in Paris until the outbreak of World War II, when they took refuge in Rio de Janeiro, only to return to Paris seven years later. By the late 1950s, Vieira da Silva achieved great fame and recognition for her complex abstract works. She continued to paint into the late 1980s and was the recipient of numerous awards, including Commandeure de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres bestowed on her by the French government in 1960. Vieira da Silva died on March 6, 1992 in Paris.
This exhibition surveys the artist’s output from the 1930s to the late 1980s, to consider Vieira da Silva’s engagement with urban architectural landscapes and the role of memory in her work. The exhibition is grounded in a selection of key paintings showing Vieira da Silva’s repeated and continuously evolving deployment of abstract forms and optical illusions. Concurrently, it draws attention to the relationship between abstraction and figuration in her work, as seen in the architectural spaces she creates, which blur the distinction between real and imaginary cityscapes.
Vieira da Silva’s work incorporates a variety of styles and influences, ranging from the decorative geometry of the Hispano-Arabic azulejo tiles to the chequered tablecloths found in Pierre Bonnard’s paintings and the abstraction of Cubism and Futurism. Her own vocabulary is based on checkerboards, networks of intertwined lines, elusive perspectives and receding spaces, which suggest in Vieira da Silva’s own words that “A painting is never finished”.
Vieira da Silva’s work is historically tied to both Peggy Guggenheim’s and Solomon R. Guggenheim’s legacies. She featured as one of the 31 artists included in Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition 31 Women held at her museum-gallery Art of This Century in 1943, while Hilla Rebay was one of the first supporters of Vieira da Silva’s work, having purchased Composition (1936) now part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Founding Collection in 1937.
Vieira da Silva reluctantly spoke about her work because she believed that “…painters may sound stupid when we talk. We know a lot of things, but we say them in our paintings.” However, once pressed for an explanation, she summed up her practice in a few poignant words: “As a rule, I don’t like works that flaunt their complications. I prefer those refined works that allow us to feel and guess, from a distance, the complexity of the things in the world.”
Gallery: 105 
Curator: Flavia Frigeri 
Venues: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venecia; Museo Guggenheim Bilbao
 
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908 – 1992) 
Figure de ballet, 1948 
Oil and graphite on canvas, 27 x 46 cm 
Courtesy Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris - Lisbon 
Inv. CR587

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born into an affluent family in Lisbon on June 13, 1908. Her father died when she was only 2 years old, and her mother

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Mark Leckey (b. Birkenhead, United Kingdom, 1964) is a British contemporary artist who lives and works in London. Since he came to prominence in the late 1990s, Leckey’s influential practice has addressed the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. His found object art and video pieces draw on elements of pop culture. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and UniAddDumThs; (2015-ongoing). He won the 2008 Turner Prize for his exhibition Industrial Light and Magic (2008).
Over the past six years Leckey has hosted a program on NTS Radio presenting experimental music by emerging and established artists. His presentation at the Guggenheim Bilbao will draw on the multiplicity of sources that go into his works such as sound, sculpture, and performance.
Galleries: 204, 208 
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
 
Mark Leckey 
Installation view, O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, Tate Britain, London, 24 September - 5 January 2020 
Photograph by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery London, and Tate.

in situ: Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey (b. Birkenhead, United Kingdom, 1964) is a British contemporary artist who lives and works in London. Since he came to prominence in the late

in situ: Mark Leckey | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Iberdrola

Rooted in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Environmental Sustainability Strategic Framework, the exhibition Arts of the Earth offers a reinterpretation of the environmentally inspired art of the past decades. In addition to providing a new diverse multidisciplinary map of artistic forms, this exhibition also seeks to offer an inventory of tools, possibilities, and futures. Arts of the Earth adopts our current concern for the health of our planet, and specifically for the survival of soil as moldable, living matrix, as the cornerstone of a journey through artistic expressions crossing all geographies. It is an itinerary that connects artifacts made of earth, wood, leaves, roots, and plants—ancestral mediums that have once again risen to importance today—with the earthly interventions of recent decades that have come to be known as Land Art or Earthworks, including living anti-monuments erected in remote places, at times ephemeral, the marks of which we interpret today as prophecies of the Anthropocene.
Over these past generations, artists from starkly different cultures have asked themselves how to work the earth when it most needs care and restoration; how to offer gratitude and pay tribute; how to learn from that which it offers us at a time when it appears to be being stripped of its biological, mineral, organic and chemical richness. The constructive potential of soil and the substances that compose it takes us far beyond the classic formulations of sculpture, architecture, or landscape architecture. Over the past years, many artists have experimented with the dynamics of this substrate and have combined processes of composition and composting, drawing lines and revealing the common roots of culture and agriculture; form, formation, and terraforming. In doing so, Arts of the Earth encompasses historic works from 1970 to today and includes formats such as sculpture, installations, drawing, and performance, in addition to an extensive selection of archive materials. Spanning practices that sometimes call for multiple forms of collaborative knowledge, it looks at the intersection of agronomy, botany, geology, chemistry, and biology with the arts, architecture, and design.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209 
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
 
Giuseppe Penone 
Nail and Laurel Leaves (Unghia e foglie di alloro), 1989 
Glass and laurel leaves 
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery 
Photo: Alex Yudzon

Arts of the Earth

Rooted in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Environmental Sustainability Strategic Framework, the exhibition Arts of the Earth offers a reinterpretation of

Arts of the Earth | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

18€ Adults - 9€ Senior - 9€ Students

TopARTE, an initiative of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, remains firmly committed to local cultural actors and organizations. The result of this fruitful collaboration is a multidisciplinary program offering a wide range of content and formats, reaching all kinds of audiences.
As part of this initiative, the Museum hosts activities from a variety of fields, including architecture, film, dance, design, gastronomy, music, performance art, and theater.

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Exhibitions

Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells

09.18.2025 - 01.18.2026

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night.

06.24.2025 - 11.09.2025

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules

04.11.2025 - 09.28.2025

in situ: Refik Anadol

03.07.2025 - 10.12.2025

Works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection

01.24.2023 - 11.07.2025

Exhibitions

upcoming

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

in situ: Mark Leckey

Arts of the Earth

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