The Director General and the curatorial team of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao present the exhibitions in the Art Program 2021

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Juan Ignacio Vidarte, Director General of the #guggenheimmuseumbilbao, and the Museum’s curatorial team—Lucía Agirre, Manuel Cirauqui, Lekha Hileman Waitoller, and Petra Joos—unveil the keys of the eightvexhibitions scheduled at the Museum in 2021. This year’s art program is characterized by the quality and variety of the shows, which are highly engaging for different types of audiences. Furthermore, this ambitious program highlights the leading role of women artists, which will be a constant presence in the Museum galleries throughout the year. Visitors will discover the artworks of Bilbao’s fin de siècle painters; groundbreaking artworks from the Roaring Twenties in Europe; contemporary video art proposals; Alice Neel's paintings; and a show entirely devoted to the contribution of women artists to abstraction from 1860 through 1980. The exhibitions comprising the Art Program 2021 are detailed below in chronological order.

Bilbao and Painting
• Dates: January 29 - August 29, 2021
• Curated by Kosme de Barañano
• Sponsored by: Iberdrola

In the fin de siècle, the city of #bilbao became one of Spain’s most prosperous cities, not only thanks to its naval and iron and steel industries, but also because of its trade, banking and cultural activity. Through a selection of paintings made by artists active in #bilbao in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this show aims to provide an overview of the creators from the Basque Country whose works incorporated ideas of modernism from French Impressionism and later from the avant-gardes. Featuring large, pictorial panoramas that present a broad variety of moments in the region’s history, the paintings in the exhibition show the fishing boats in the estuary and leisure in the terraces, the life of the upper class and townsfolk, oarsmen and yachtsmen, baptism parties and the harvest in the villages, death at sea and at war, sports heroes, and everyday tasks in a fishing port.

Film & Video: #alexreynolds. There is a Law, There is a Hand, There is a Song
• Dates: February 19 - June 13, 2021
• Curated by #manuelcirauqui, curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Alex Reynolds (b. 1978, Bilbao) is an artist and filmmaker who is constantly driven to explore and test out the narrative structures, sequences of commands, and pacing structures at work in cinematic production. Often using intangibly fictional registers, her work measures tensions between being a spectator and a witness, the  limits of the point of view, and the exchange of emotions triggered by a visual device. Focusing on narration, she analyzes power relations and influence, games and gaps in such communications, and suspends the mere automatism of image meaning. Thus emerge the recurring themes of her inquiry, from the portrait (with and without faces), to rhythm structure (perhaps musical), and architectures (visible and invisible). Reynolds’s most recent work includes a number of collaborations with choreographer Alma Söderberg, amongst which being The Hand that Sings, a most recent production to be shown for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition at the #guggenheimmuseumbilbao.

The Roaring Twenties
• Dates: May 7 - September 19, 2021
• Curated by #catherinehug, curator, #kunsthauszurich, and #petrajoos, curator, Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao
• The exhibition is a collaboration between #guggenheimmuseumbilbao and Kunsthaus Zürich

Humans’ desire to innovate reached its peak during the 20th century in the 1920s. This decade witnessed the development of ideas in many ways more progressive than those of today: ambitious urban plans were created; cities expanded swiftly; conventional role models in society and institutions such as marriage were questioned; minorities or segments of the population that had up until then experienced discrimination and repression, such as women or homosexuals, started to play a role in culture and politics; the working day was adapted to better meet the needs of workers meanwhile a growing leisure industry prospered; and an increasingly democratic mobility permeated all spheres of everyday life. The Roaring Twenties is focuses on Berlin and Paris as examples of metropolises home to these specific realities of the 1920s, but also includes looks at other avant-garde hotbeds, such as Vienna or Zurich. Called Les années folles [the crazy years] in French or Die wilden Zwanziger [the wild twenties] in Germanspeaking countries, the Roaring Twenties was a phenomenon that arose simultaneously across all large cities in the Western world. It is certainly meaningful that almost any person can easily identify at least one feature specific to the 1920s to this day—whether its pixie hairdos, tight-fitting clothing emphasizing erotic elements, extravagant fashion, savage dancing to the rhythm of jazz, or the concept of cinema as the ideal screen for projecting new utopias and as a stimulating source of inspiration and escape. Across Europe but especially in France and Germany, countries that suffered greatly at the hands of World War I, #people wanted to leave behind the years of trauma and bring in better times, showing a profound desire to live a fuller life in the new social circumstances resulting from change. The exhibition design will be created by #calixtobieito, acclaimed opera stage designer thanks to his contribution to the innovation of European culture. In 2013 he was appointed art director of the Basel Theater and in January 2016, of the Arriaga Theater in #bilbao.

The Line of Wit
• Dates: June 11, 2021 - February 6, 2022
• Curated by #lekhahilemanwaitoller, curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The Line of Wit explores a selection of work from the Guggenheim #museo Bilbao’s permanent collection and
long-term loans characterized as humorous, clever, and experimental. Relentlessly inquisitive in nature, these
works employ unusual materials and techniques, and many playfully defy social, political, and aesthetic
conventions demonstrating ingenuity and wit.

The first gallery of the exhibition focuses on works that engage technology and unorthodox processes such a Yoko Ono’s Hichiko Happo, a work comprised of nine canvases painted during a public performance. The second gallery is comprised of a selection of works that are representational or figurative in nature, displaying the myriad ways in which artists choose to depict their subjects. Works by #antoniosaura, #henrimichaux, and #georgbaselitz present unconventional approaches to portraiture in an expressionistic style. #juanmunozshadow and Mouth presents a realistic approach to the human figure through a peculiar theatrical scene that leaves the story up to the imagination of the viewer. The final gallery draws together a selection of abstract works that are experimental in their use of materials or process. Prudencio Irazabal’s signature application of pigment, for example, relies on a custom mix of liquid polymer and pigment to achieve a particularly luminous effect. Rodney Graham’s 2-part work, Film Still relies on the architecture of a corner to implicate the viewer through the mirroring-effect of the highly reflective black canvases that face one another. By approaching the work, the viewer effectively becomes the subject of the film still. Eccentric, intriguing, and humorous, The Line of Wit presents experiments with technology, representation, and process.

Film & Video: #ceciliabengolea. Lightning Dance
• Dates: June 24 - September 26, 2021
• Curated by #manuelcirauqui, curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice merges video, choreography, and sculpture. In her investigation, Bengolea explores forms of popular dance which combine contemporary and archaic elements, where the timeless concept of figuration reappears. Just as in the majority
of her projects, her recent composition Lightning Dance (2018) is based on a profound collaboration between the artist and the featured performers. The work, in this case, belongs to the series developed by Bengolea around dancehall culture on the island of Jamaica. This vibrant piece investigates the influence of atmospheric electricity on behavior and the imagination. The rhythm constructed by the video shows a constant intertwining of musical and environmental energies, thunder and percussion, synchronized as part of a unique sound system. For these groups of performers, not only is dance a form of expression but it is also invested  with curative powers. This spectacular piece is joined by two digital animations where the artist, using hologram-like imagery, visualizes the fantastical transformations of a body in perpetual change.

Alice Neel: #people Come First
• Dates: September 17, 2021 - January 23, 2022
• Curated by #kellybaum, #cynthiahazenpolsky and #leonpolsky Curator of #contemporaryart, and
Randall Griffey, Curator, Modern and #contemporaryart, The Met with Lucia Agirre, Curator,
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
• Sponsored by: Iberdrola
• Exhibition organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Alice Neel: #people Come First will be the first retrospective in Spain of American artist #aliceneel (b. 1900; d. 1984). This ambitious survey will position Neel as one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art, as demonstrated in the approximately one hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors that will appear in this survey. Images of activists demonstrating against fascism and racism will appear alongside paintings of impoverished victims of the Great Depression, as well as portraits of Neel’s neighbors in Spanish Harlem, leaders from a wide range of political organizations, queer artists and performers, and members of New York’s global diaspora. The exhibition will also highlight Neel’s erotic watercolors and pastels from the 1930s, her depictions of mothers, and her paintings of nude figures (some of them visibly pregnant), all of whose candor and irreverence are without precedent in the history of Western art. A longtime resident of the city, New York served as Neel’s most faithful subject. Indeed, the sum total of her work testifies to the drama of its streets, the quotidian beauty of its buildings, and most importantly, the diversity, resilience, and passion of its residents. “For me, #people come first,” Neel declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”

Film & Video: Sharon Lockhart. Noa Eshkol’s Movement Notation
• Dates: October 7, 2021 - February 27, 2022
• Curated by #manuelcirauqui, curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The video installations and photographic works of Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964, Norwood, USA) pay particular attention to human action, and its modes of representation be it social or in solitude. From artistic work to choreography, she highlights the complexity and poetic depth of a simple movement. Among Lockhart’s many inquiries into this subject, reflection on the work of Israeli researcher, theorist, and choreographer Noa Eshkol (b. 1895; d. 1969) has an exceptional place in the artist’s last decade of production. Eshkol is known for her pioneering efforts to transcribe human movements into a writing system capable of registering almost all body movement modalities. In the installation Four Exercises in Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (2011), one of Eshkol’s most accomplished students conducts a series of exercises from this system based on strict composition patterns, and raises the possibility of articulating messages through body language as if space were a textual medium. The performer’s concentration and her awareness of each movement give the performance a serenity and power on par with one another. The silence of the film further intensifies the purity of the gestures, the scores of which adopt three-dimensional geometric forms in Lockhart’s photographs. This installation is the result of a special collaboration with the Thyssen Bornemisza Art 21 (TBA21) collection and The Wellbeing Project.

Women in Abstraction
• Dates: October 22, 2021 - February 27, 2022
• Curated by #christinemacel and #karolinalewandowska, curators, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Lekha
Hileman Waitoller, curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
• Sponsored by: BBVA Foundation
• Exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao

Women in Abstraction aims to trace a lesser-told history of art primarily from the 20th and 21st centuries by focusing on the contribution of women artists to abstraction. The exhibition includes over 200 artists working across disciplines, such as dance, applied arts, photography, film, and performance art from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, Europe, and the United States in order to tell an expansive and complex story with many voices. Many exhibitions dealing with abstraction underestimate the fundamental role played by women in the development of this movement. By focusing on the paths of artists, some of whom were unfairly ignored, the exhibition proposes another history. Women in Abstraction brings to light the decisive turning points that have marked this movement, evoking both the research undertaken by artists, individually or as a group, and the founding exhibitions.