Women on Tour
Welcome to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao!
In this tour, which you can take at your own pace, you will see a number of works from the Museum Collection or on loan created by female artists or showing women. We would like to share them with you, giving them the place they deserve in the history of art and culture
Jenny Holzer
Atrium
Jenny Holzer has resorted to language as a means of artistic expression since 1977. Her Truisms – a series of aphorisms and slogans that utilize modern clichés and commonly held truths about war, politics, death, and violence, among other topics – are some of her best-known works.
To convey her messages, Holzer uses a variety of media, which she installs in public spaces: billboards, neon signs, electronic signaling devices, etc.
Installation for Bilbao was made in 1997 for the Museum gallery where it can be seen today, using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to emit light while saving energy.
Now walk around the LED columns and take a look from the opposite side!
Jenny Holzer, Installation for Bilbao, 1997/2017
Electronic LED signs
Site-specific dimensions
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Louise Bourgeois
Exterior next to the footbridge
Now walk out onto the terrace and take a look at our next landmark.
Louise Bourgeois had a long, prolific career, spanning almost… seven decades! She interacted with some of the leading avant-garde movements of the 20th century, sticking to her own style—innovative, independent, and creative. Bourgeois was a multidisciplinary artist, but sculpture was her main means of expression, connecting art to space.
Over 9 meters in height, Maman is one of Bourgeois’s most ambitious works. Spiders were a subject and a motif in her work. In them, the artist paid tribute to her mother, who was a weaver. Did you know?
Spiders can be disturbing, but they can also be noble and protective. Can you tell why?
Maman, 1999
Bronze, marble, and stainless steel
927 x 891 x 1023 cm
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Yoko Ono
Level 2 terrace
Yoko Ono is a key figure in contemporary creation, especially in performance and participatory art. She played a key role in the Japanese avant-garde and was a member of Fluxus, an American and European interdisciplinary community of artists who engaged in experimental art performances during the 1960s and 1970s.
Ono is also a peace activist and an advocate of feminism and human rights.
Wish Tree for Bilbao is a participatory work inviting visitors to make a wish for peace and, on certain days, hang it in the tree. The wishes are then collected and sent to Ono, to be included in her ongoing project for world peace. When the tree is not available for written prayers, you can just whisper your wish.
Come on! Make a wish!
Wish Tree for Bilbao, 1996/2014
Handwritten framed text, olive tree, soil, wooden pot, lectern, labels, and pens
Dimensions variable
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Cristina Iglesias
Gallery 307, level 3
Cristina Iglesias has contributed a new concept of sculpture, experimenting with space in her poetic, symbolically-laden works and installations.
Her sculptures are meant to be “inhabited” and her spaces are designed to produce certain sensations in the viewers.
In Untitled (Alabaster Room), light generates a soft glow through the alabaster slabs, which changes the perception of the space beneath them.
As in many of Iglesias’s works, ambient light and space are key, almost immaterial features.
Untitled (Alabaster Room) [Sin título (Habitación de alabastro)]
1993
Iron and alabaster
313 x 560 x 218.5 cm
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Yayoi Kusama
Gallery 301
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist and writer with a unique voice that has earned her a well-deserved place in the history of art. To Kusama, art can be a tool for social change. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, she is also active in painting, drawing, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms are immersive installations that transport the viewer into the artist’s unique vision of endless reflections.
In Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe, Kusama projects the hallucinations she had when she was a child, making us part of her unique creative world while affirming the need for “self-obliteration.”
What can you see in this Infinity Mirrored Room? How do you feel in here?
Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe, 2020
Mirrored glass, wood, LED lighting system, metal, and acrylic panel
293.7 x 417 x 417 cm
We have come to the end of this tour, including works by some of the leading women artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are many more, of course. You must be familiar with some of them! After leaving the Museum, you can share your thoughts about them with your family and friends!
We hope this tour has been an enjoyable and nurturing experience. Also, we hope to see you again soon!