Following 20 years of fits and starts, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open to visitors on 11 December 2026, according to an announcement released today. The museum, designed by late architect Frank Gehry, will join a cluster of starchitect-designed cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile landmass off the coast of Abu Dhabi.

The project, a partnership between the Guggenheim Foundation and Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, will be a temple to modern and contemporary art from around the world – a collection the museum has been amassing since 2009.

While details about programming and specific artworks have yet to be released, the museum says that it will display works across mediums, including painting, sculpture, film, installation, digital art and more. A 2015 exhibition titled 'Seeing Through Light: Selections from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection' included works by artists including Yayoi Kusama, Rachid Koraïchi, Robert Irwin, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Douglas Wheeler.

‘The museum’s art collection is uniquely local and global, centered in the region but with works from all continents,’ said Guggenheim Foundation director and CEO Dr. Mariët Westermann in a statement.

Gehry, who died in December 2025, conceived of the building as an assemblage of 10 conical volumes that together create a ‘skyline’ of stainless steel mesh, glass and onyx. The 125,000 sq ft structure will contain 30 galleries which surround a towering central atrium. The museum, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, ‘is designed to impress at every level.’

The Guggenheim Foundation first revealed that it would build a satellite museum on Saadiyat Island in 2006, a project that would join Guggenheim locations in New York, Venice and Bilbao, Spain – a Gehry-designed project so successful that it became a byword for urban revitalisation.

Reaching the project’s finish line, however, wasn’t without hurdles and controversies. Contract changes and economic strain caused the museum, first projected to open in 2013, to be delayed for years. The treatment of migrant labourers on Saadiyat Island construction sites also drew fire from human rights activists and artists, sparking protests and eventually leading Gehry to engage a human rights lawyer to monitor site conditions.

Still, said Westermann, the ‘Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be a source of wonder, a hub of connection, and a place of curiosity and joy for people from the United Arab Emirates and the world.’

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will join multiple museums and cultural sites on Saadiyat island, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel; the Zayed National Museum, designed by Foster + Partners; the Abrahamic Family House, designed by David Adjaye; in addition to the under-construction Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi, a performing arts centre also designed by Gehry.

What does being a poet-in-residence involve? It is ‘a great opportunity to restore our sense of poetry as a profoundly social experience, instead of it being a strictly private, individual experience,’ says Patrick Rosal, recently announced as Guggenheim New York’s resident poet for 2026. ‘From griot to liturgical cantor to babaylan to Greek chorus, we have experienced poetry as live utterance across the entirety of human history and culture.’

New Jersey-based Rosal is well placed to consider the issue. A professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden, he has published several poetry collections to widespread acclaim, receiving awards, including the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and fellowships, notably from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Research Program.

Rosal is interested in the links between his words and the earth, intertwining reflections on human connection with an appreciation of the tangible. In his works, Rosal gives his ecological approach a sensory edge, a philosophy encapsulated in his residency here, titled The Water Listeners.

Rosal is inextricably drawn to water. ‘For decades now, I've been dreaming of water and storms, incredible cataclysms. In my dreams, I've stood before massive walls of water just as they're about to crash ashore. I've watched cities crumble into the banks of a river. I've seen the horizontal blur of a devastating typhoon outside a bedroom window. And in waking life, on our own street in Rahway, New Jersey, we get floods pretty quickly when big storms hit.’

Rosal is keen that expressing this sense of power extends beyond words, wanting also to involve visitors and encourage them to interact. As part of his residency, he has devised a five-question interview about water which people can ask each other, triggering conversations that become the foundations of poetry. ‘It's the opportunity for remembering, imagining, and listening, which is what poetry is, in the end,’ he adds. ‘And water is so embedded in our memory. Some of us have an ongoing conversation with water, not just as researchers or artists, but as cooks, janitors, clerics, nurses, as those who love to swim and those who are terrified of lakes. In the aggregate, we might listen to each other listening to the story and song of water, and maybe that makes a kind of literature. This Guggenheim residency lets me take some of these components and principles of language, attention, and ecology, and design some gatherings that invite the public to work with the elemental material of poetry.’

It is a project rooted in Rosal’s own experience. Growing up in New Jersey - where he has since returned to live - meant that museums in general felt distant and unapproachable. ‘Almost none of the people I grew up with think of the Guggenheim as a place to visit regularly,’ he says.

He is keen to change this perception, considering the architecture of the museum itself as a way of opening this dialogue. The museum’s fountain, from which the space opens up into a light-filled spiral, is a circulatory talking point from which to transform the museum with the sound of poetry. ‘With that in mind, I want to think about the way language, story, and song circulate through time and space, like water itself, a way for poetry - its images, ideas, language, and feeling - to flow and return the way rivers do. In sensory terms, poetry-as-sound has this spatial dimension. By thinking of poetry as both written and spoken in a ritual context we can invite people to experience and perhaps even craft artifacts that will be part of a larger, culminating performance around water that collaborates with the rotunda or other spaces in the museum architecture.’

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The Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence programme, established in 2021, is made possible by the support of Van Cleef & Arpels

Swatch’s latest collaboration with the Guggenheim museums places famous 20th-century artworks directly on the wrist.

Created in partnership with the Guggenheim New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the new Swatch x Guggenheim Collection introduces four watches inspired by artworks by Edgar Degas, Paul Klee, Claude Monet and Jackson Pollock.

The project forms part of Swatch’s ongoing Art Journey, an initiative through which the Swiss watchmaker has worked with major cultural institutions to turn museum-held works into wearable form. The collaboration builds on a relationship between Swatch and the Guggenheim institutions that dates back to the early 1990s, during which the brand has supported exhibitions and initiatives across both New York and Venice.

The newest collection touches both sides of the Atlantic, drawing on three artworks from the Guggenheim New York and one from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where the timepieces were unveiled.

Each watch takes a single artwork as its starting point, translating its colour and composition onto the dial. Dancers in Green and Yellow, created by French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas in 1903, inspires a design that isolates the ballerina’s feet on the dial, while the straps are decorated with the dancers’ bodies and billowing tutus.

Claude Monet’s The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore, an Impressionist painting of the Doge’s Palace painted from a gondola in the Grand Canal in 1908 during his only trip to Venice, is the clearest nod to Venice in the new collection, with the palace’s façade rendered on a watch dial and the shimmering water’s shifting reflections carried across the strap. A playful touch appears when the dial is exposed to UV light, revealing a glow-in-the-dark effect and causing the dial to shine a vivid orange.

Paul Klee’s 1919 watercolour and ink work The Bavarian Don Giovanni lends its central figure to the corresponding watch dial, with names from the artwork printed along the strap, alongside a colour-changing calendar wheel. Finally, Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy, one of Pollock's most recognisable paintings, dating from 1947, and one of the most significant works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, is translated into a watch that incorporates its its splattered patterns across both the dial and strap, in reference to the artist’s radical technique that involved pouring, splattering and dripping paint onto the canvas.

A double-length second hand appears across all four watches, referencing the transatlantic connection between the Guggenheim institutions in New York and Venice. And for watch lovers looking to support worthy causes, the new Swatches also support initiatives at the Guggenheim museums aimed at safeguarding artworks for future generations.

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In a vintage video interview with Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), the artist says, ‘There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules.’ Curator Douglas Dreishpoon took this as his cue for a new exhibition, ‘Painting Without Rules’ at Guggenheim Bilbao. The show is adapted from the recent installation he composed at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and is the first major survey of Frankenthaler’s work to be shown in Europe since her death at the age of 83.

Successful throughout her half-century-long career, with admired solo shows and museum retrospectives on both sides of the Atlantic, Frankenthaler was for a long time the only woman treated with comparable significance to her male peers in art historical scholarship on postwar abstract painting. Dreishpoon is now in the process of assembling the painter’s catalogue raisonée with her foundation, having already co-authored a book on her later works, and his intimacy with her extensive body of work can be felt in both this exhibition and its vibrant catalogue.

The rule-breaking of the title speaks to the midcentury painting revolution to which Frankenthaler contributed, alongside her fellow Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters, many of whom were in her closest circle. It especially reflects her individually expansive approach to the trusty canvas (usually on the floor) and on occasion to sculpture too – like the summer she bashed out ten steel pieces in a two-week stretch at her friend Anthony Caro’s London studio, following her 1971 divorce from her first husband, the painter Robert Motherwell.

Some of these sculptures are on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao, alongside those of Caro and her close friend David Smith, who died young and whose work Frankenthaler kept near always. They’re alive and chaotic, they make sense but also don’t, and that’s a valuable insight into Frankenthaler’s paintings, which are geometric but not, organised yet imperfect, clever and wild. They’re influenced by the older, well-known painters from her coterie, including Pollock and Rothko, but they’re also not like these men’s paintings. It’s as if she absorbed elements of their methods and then expanded on them, integrating some of their techniques and evolving them into a body of work that’s transcendentally greater than the sum of its parts.

‘Painting Without Rules’ is a show about relationships, both artistic and personal, in keeping with Dreishpoon’s biographical approach to the study of art and art history. Whether or not it’s right or fair to read the work of a female artist through the lens of her personal life is a question we still need to ask, particularly when male artists are rarely framed through the lens of their relationships with key women in their lives and how those women shaped their work and ideas (unless in the problematic role of muse). Frankenthaler’s prolific career has been celebrated by numerous shows and books, but few have resisted mentioning her male connections.

What did she contribute to her ‘man painter’ friends’ work and to the history of modern art? ‘Others before her may have stained their canvases,’ says Dreishpoon, ‘but Frankenthaler’s fearless use of the soak-stain technique exploded the process of painting.’ She submerged sponges and rollers in thinned-out oil, then acrylic paint, and allowed it to soak into the fabric of monumental unprimed canvases, creating amorphous, organic-looking stains. She made her breakthrough using this method at the age of 23, in 1952, with the renowned Mountains and Sea, a work foundational to Colour Field painting and the starting point for techniques she would later explore over the years (many represented in the exhibition).

The show focuses on Frankenthaler’s relationships to guide its sequencing – not only her romantic relationships, although they are included because she took lovers and husbands from within her professional milieu, but primarily her creative relationships, with the painters, poets, critics and sculptors she lived among. Just inside the entrance we encounter Pollock’s Circumcision from 1946 ,in close proximity to Western Dream from 1957, showing how his treating painting like drawing – spontaneous, freehand, sketchy – influenced her as a young artist.

Frankenthaler said she liked Pollock’s paintings because they gave the impression ‘something had happened’. From 1959, the word ‘happenings’ started being used to describe a less formal style of art-related event that was emerging. It spoke to a dynamic, living art, a scene animated by spontaneity and social connection. Something happened in Frankenthaler’s paintings too – something dramatic and expressive, something somatic, to expand the often-used word ‘gestural’ to include the whole body and being into how she approached action painting.

Dreishpoon brings up the emergence of New York’s postwar downtown vernacular when he points out the artist’s recurrent square motif. ‘Square’ as opposed to ‘hip’. An uptown girl living a downtown bohemian life, Frankenthaler was both. In her work, squares repeatedly intersect with, yet rarely contain, various flowing, entangled forms. The curator reads them as representing the way that certain structures – maybe a marriage or societal expectations – come into play with the freeform chaos of life.

Frankenthaler was born to a ‘good Jewish family’ on the Upper East Side, and was given financial support, education, and confidence. She grew up in a privileged environment but suffered from the loss of her father at the age of 11. She had solo shows at respected galleries and was curated into era-defining group shows. Her first retrospective, at the Jewish Museum in 1960, was curated by the poet Frank O’Hara.

The Upper East Side townhouse she shared with Motherwell hosted numerous parties and was photographed for an article in Vogue. A blow-up featuring a Rothko over the mantlepiece, between a painting by her and another by her husband, compellingly takes up one wall in the exhibition. The art director of American Vogue, Alexander Liberman, was a close friend. A great painter, yes, and simultaneously a socialite. Like everyone who’s ever had a big career, Frankenthaler was unapologetically ambitious.

One of her early boyfriends, Clement Greenberg (twice her age and considered by some to be last century’s most influential art critic) once said, in front of Frankenthaler and another woman painter, Lee Krasner, that there would never be a great woman artist. Not long afterwards, Frankenthaler painted Scene With Nude, controversial in 1950s America, especially for a young woman. It contains what some see as an inference towards ‘splayed thighs’, which her biographer, Mary Gabriel, suggests was a taunt in response to Greenberg’s gender bias.

Fighting her corner in a misogynist climate, the artist was reluctant to be known as a woman painter, and declined invitations from places like then-new and now-cult downtown femme gallery A.I.R. As for any woman of her generation, especially one with a career, assimilating to aspects of machismo was essential for survival.

Frankenthaler’s freedom in painting was correctly interpreted as transgressive, even by some of her peers. She left the camaraderie of her first gallery because some of the feedback was so cutting. Opinions could be similarly hostile at times later on, but by then she’d grown a thicker skin. Her work is often praised for its formal beauty, through criteria initially laid out by Greenberg, in an effort to protect artists from being targeted for their beliefs at a time when, like now, the New York police and CIA were punishing and paranoid. Postwar abstraction was a form of resistance, against legibility (important politically) and cliché (important aesthetically).

Dreishpoon opens the door to interpretive readings of some of the 1970s paintings, which he describes as ‘provocative and enigmatic’: birth canal-like passageways harbouring floating forms suggest the anatomy of a female body that synchronised with feminism’s rise in the US and womens’ rights with Roe v Wade. They also synched with her divorce, the divorces of many friends, and some of their abortions.

In the 1970s section of ‘Painting Without Rules’, we see Frankthaler painting landscape-like forms: bluescapes with blood red and skin tone strikes across them; sandy yellow waves like aerial view coastlines with black lines that could be… Hairs? Cuts? Boundary crossings? There’s a human scale red-stained figure in the water held down by a straight line, with red dots at the mouth and throat. The paintings are huge. Specifics remain out of reach.

Abstraction thrives on ambiguity. Frankenthaler loved that about it. It is also inherently embodied and emotional, despite art criticism’s best efforts to post-rationalise it as an intellectual position. The ways in which the most celebrated abstract paintings were made, including hers, weren’t necessarily abstract acts, intellectually generated. The word ‘abstraction’ implies that an idea comes first, and is then departed from. Frankenthaler didn’t work like that. Creative impulse channelled through her automatically – that’s where her genius comes into play.

Frankenthaler was well-read and a prolific writer. Her seriosity didn’t constrain her, though. So at ease was she in her seriousness, she wasn’t afraid to mix it with emotionality and elementality, or to lighten it with humour. Her work’s expansiveness, its depth of character, reflects this complexity. As Dreishpoon puts it, ‘An artist unconstrained by rules can be whatever she wanted to be at any given moment. Frankenthaler’s notion of beauty, never cosmetic, was as complicated as the human condition.’

'Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules' is at Guggenheim Bilbao until 28 September 2025

guggenheim-bilbao.eus

Artist, poet, novelist, playwright, film-maker – Jean Cocteau was all of them and more. Perhaps, though, it was the poet’s dreamy nature that defined him, his unbounded approach to art forever propelling Cocteau towards the fringes of the modernist movement. Yet, he was at the heart of it, and it was Cocteau who invited Picasso to create the sets and costumes for his ballet, Parade, created with Erik Satie for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in 1917.

‘Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’

This staging of Italy’s most extensive retrospective of Cocteau, ‘Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’, a carnival of 150 works, including drawings, posters, an incredible array of jewellery, tapestries and film excerpts, is a tender dedication. For it was with a collection of Cocteau’s drawings and furniture designs that Peggy Guggenheim launched her inaugural exhibition and career as a gallerist, at Guggenheim Jeune, London, in 1938.

The show caused an uproar with British customs because, as Guggenheim later recounted, ‘One [of the works was] an allegorical subject called La peur donnant ailes au Courage, which included a portrait of the actor Jean Marais. He and two decadent-looking figures appeared with pubic hairs.' Painted by Cocteau on a cotton sheet, this erotic tableau – Marais had become his lover the year before – is a star exhibit in an entire gallery of them.

The galleries are carefully defined, all the better to comprehend the scintillating scope of Cocteau's artistic output. As such, the order offers fresh insight. The collection of Cocteau's authored books, for instance, shines a light on lesser-known titles The Infernal Machine, The Difficulty of Being, and Profil-Opium. It also allows an overview of his book, magazine and poster design, and Cocteau's incisive approach to each medium

Then there's the jewellery design, which occupies the entire Gallery 10, and where we see Cocteau's recurring classical motifs rendered in gold, enamel and precious stones. A plastic, metal and faux pearl 'eye' brooch designed for Schiaparelli, however, is a highlight.

The exhibition also allows a rare opportunity to see the exquisite gold, silver and gem-set sword the Maisons-Laffitte-born artist designed for Cartier. Cocteau, whose film-making career flourished later in life, was invited to design the ‘Academician Sword for Jean Cocteau’ with its divine lyre, star and Orpheus outline, in 1955, when he was afforded membership to the Académie Française.

While this show is a passionately assembled love letter to a 20th-century cultural great, the clumsy ‘juggler’ label doesn’t do much to dispel the myth of the artist as the handyman creative. Nor does the exhibition organiser Kenneth E Silver’s argument for Cocteau as ‘a model for the kind of wide-ranging cultural fluidity we now expect of contemporary artists’ convince, considering Picasso, a close friend of Cocteau, also designed ceramics and jewellery.

So, let’s leave the last word to WH Auden: ‘The lasting feeling that his work leaves is one of happiness; not, of course, in the sense that it excludes suffering, but because, in it, nothing is rejected, resented, or regretted. Happiness is a surer sign of wisdom than we are apt to think, and perhaps Cocteau has more of it than some others.’

‘Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’ is at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice until 16 September 2024

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You might have seen the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña before. You might have been staggered by its scale, its command of materials, or its ability to envelop space and all who encounter it. But you might not know all that Vicuña’s work stands for, or all it took to get here. 

Vicuña has the sort of speaking voice that doesn’t demand attention. It’s quiet, dulcet and melodious. What she says, however, warrants undivided attention, an advantage she and her work have long been denied. 

For most of Vicuña’s prolific 50-year career as an artist, poet, filmmaker and activist, she has been ignored, censored, marginalised, and ridiculed. When we meet at her studio, in the Tribeca district of New York, she explains that this alienation has its roots in the West’s ‘mastery’ in denying all that matters to people, the Earth and the future. This, she notes, is not just a story about how the Global North has excluded the South, but how the South has excluded itself by only embracing a Northern mentality. ‘All knowledge that disagrees with the Western system is eliminated, sometimes brutally, like in the current extermination of Indigenous people around the world’, she explains as a thread of incense billows through the air between us. ‘The Western mind is not just Europe and the US, [it] also operates in the colonies, and I consider Chile, even today, a colonised country where everybody is subjected to a colonisation of the mind, spirit and soul. So how could my work be meaningful under those conditions?’ In light of her potent and steadfast opposition to this oppressive landscape, Vicuña ‘never expected or looked for appreciation [or] recognition.’

Now, in 2022, Vicuña is having what is known as a moment. In April, she was honoured with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale (where she has an installation in the main exhibition, ‘The Milk of Dreams’); she’s the subject of a major survey show at the Guggenheim in New York, and later this year, she will dominate the nave-like cavern that is Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for the 2022 Hyundai Commission. 

Is she frustrated it all took so long? ‘Incredibly, no,’ she says. ‘This is true and not completely true, because what happened to me is the reason I was able to continue doing what I was doing; I found souls, people, that believed in what I did.’ 

Born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile, Vicuña spent her early years in the Maipo Valley, enveloped in a liberal rural environment where being clothed was actively discouraged (‘my mother believed that clothes were detrimental’, she says), and education and creativity were nurtured (her father even built her a garden studio for painting). ‘The whole family knew I was an artist [at] two years old,’ she laughs. But her childhood was not entirely

drenched in freedom. Her grandfather, a historian, was jailed four times for defending civil rights in Chile, and her family frequently took in refugees from the Jewish diaspora and the República Española following the Second World War.

In spite of what was to come, Vicuña’s early life held a promise of swift success. At 18, her poetry was published in Mexico’s El Corno Emplumado (according to Vicuña, ‘the best poetry magazine that existed at the time’). At 23, she received two solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago. Vicuña believes this was only possible because it was the 1960s, a decade when minds were opened and ‘creativity engulfed the entire planet’. Then, in 1973, a wave of military coups arrived in Latin America, which deposed the democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and ushered in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. This, as Vicuña puts it, brought ‘a closing of the mind, and the closing of all potentialities.’ 

As these events unfolded, Vicuña was in London, where she had enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Arts on a British Council scholarship and would remain in exile for three years (from 1975, she continued her self-exile in Bogotá, Colombia). ‘They asked me “which course do you want to follow?” I said, “I don’t want a course, I just want a studio”, so that’s what they did. I never had classmates’, she recalls. The studio was in Stepney Green, then a ‘brutal’ area defined by prostitution and deprivation.

In London, Vicuña was poor in material, but rich in ambition. She began searching for somewhere to show her work. She found the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and proposed an exhibition. ‘I didn’t know that young South American girls didn’t do that. I was so naïve,’ she says. But Vicuña’s proposal fell into the hands of the ‘enlightened’ ICA co-founder, Roland Penrose, who requested that she visit him at the museum. ‘He said to me, “you are a great artist, but my board is absolutely adamant that you should not have an exhibition here”,’ she recalls. ‘“They think that you are worthless. But be sure, you will encounter this throughout your life, but you have to know within yourself that that’s not true.’ In spite of his board’s reluctance, Penrose managed to secure a space for Vicuna’s first solo show in London. ‘Pain Things & Explanations’ (1973) took place in the hallway leading to the ICA toilets.

‘Many years later, through friends who were scholars and researchers, I told this story and they searched the archives of the ICA and this exhibition, along with many other exhibitions, were not in their archives. Not in their records, like it never happened,’ she recalls. 

In the late 1960s and 70s, Vicuña created a number of oil paintings, many of which were either lost or destroyed due to travel, the Chilean military coup, and a lack of care and respect for her painting practice. Vicuña estimates that, during her career, around 40 per cent of these works were thrown away. In 1986, she stopped painting entirely. She has only recently returned to the medium, reclaiming her history through reimagined versions of significant earlier works, driven by the lost paintings of her past. ‘Sometimes I wish they still existed, but I think an awareness of the precarious nature of our existence imbued everything that I did all along.’ 

Vicuña’s most recognisable works are installations called quipus. These monumental pieces rain from the ceilings of exhibition spaces in streams of raw, unspun wool and debris. They are an homage to, and contemporary reactivation of the ancient record-keeping quipus (made from long textile cords with a knot system) of the Incas and other ancient Andean cultures that bound communities but were banned by the Spanish during their colonisation of South America. Contemporary audiences may be surprised to learn that her first quipu consisted only of an empty cord – it was a ‘mind quipu’, perhaps an elegy to what was taken away, or an invitation to imagine what could have been. ‘All the quipus I have done come from the “mind quipu”,’ she explains.

Vicuña’s exhibition at the Guggenheim is the premiere of a new three-part work titled Quipu del exterminio / Extermination Quipu (2022). Suspended in the High Gallery, a double-height space at the beginning of the museum’s spiral ramp, it’s at once an installation, a poem, and a call to action against the extinction of the Earth’s species. ‘Can we acknowledge extermination?’ asks a poem hand-scrawled in red on the wall behind the installation, inspired by texts by American theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. ‘The quipu is the speaker of blood. Each knot marking a loss… a wound… the extermination of life.’ 

‘More than a year ago, before knowing exactly how the quipu was going to be, she asked for some silent time for herself in the High Gallery. This allowed her to use the Guggenheim spiral as a connector, connecting her with Earth and sky, and incorporating energy and millennial wisdom into the work,’ recalls Pablo León de la Barra, who co-curated the show with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães. ‘Then [on] the day of installation she asked all of the team to make a circle in the space and hold hands. Incorporating her shamanic persona, she began chanting sounds and connecting us to one another, to the space, the building, her work and the energy of the universe. In the same manner, she did a prayer the day the quipu installation was finished, and now called it a prayer against extinction and for the Earth.’

León de la Barra first became aware of Vicuña’s work ten years ago while researching for an exhibition for the David Roberts Foundation (now The Roberts Institute of Art), which focused on Latin American artists who had been in political exile in London during the late 1960s and early 70s. ‘Although [Vicuña] has been based in New York for 40 years, the New York art world ignored her until she showed in Documenta in 2017’, León de la Barra notes. ‘On the other hand, this allowed her to develop her incredible and diverse body of work in silence and without the pressures of the art market.’

Titled ‘Spin Spin Triangulene’, the Guggenheim show is a focused offering of multidisciplinary work from the 1960s to today. Themes such as memory, language, science, cybernetics, and Indigenous spirituality and knowledge are explored through paintings, works on paper, language-based Palabrarmas (or ‘word weapons’, political and metaphorical riddles and poems which present language as a living entity), textiles, a site-specific quipu, and a one-time performance on 31 August of a ‘living’ quipu, commissioned by the museum’s Latin American Circle.

Lining the walls of the Guggenheim’s spiral are Vicuña’s paintings, which subvert colonial symbols, formats and media. Autobiography meets the rise of global socialism, alongside works that directly confront Frank Lloyd Wright’s museum architecture.

These include the deeply personal Autobiografia, which traces Vicuña’s life from birth until the work’s creation in 1971, and paintings of figures including Chilean folk singer and social activist Violeta Parra and German philosopher Karl Marx, which evoke religious icons. Vicuña presents Marx in a utopian ‘garden of eternal delights’ filled with amorous homosexual bodies. This painting has its own story of survival during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, when those who opposed the regime were openly persecuted. To prevent the work from being seized by authorities, Nemesio Antúnez, artist and then-director of Santiago’s Museum of Fine Arts, hid the painting in his home, painted over the name ‘Karl Marx’, and replaced it with ‘Charles Darwin’ (the evolutionary biologist had a similar white beard), an amendment since reversed.

Another notable work in ‘Spin Spin Triangulene’ is the new painting, Three Spirals. It contains three images and three narratives, each distinct, but inextricably linked. On the left is Chuquicamata, the world’s biggest open-air copper mine, located in the north of Chile and owned by the Guggenheim family from 1912-23. In the centre is a spiralled conch flute, used by Mayans in sacred rituals. Mayan architecture in turn was a frequent source of inspiration in Wright’s work; a likely source of inspiration for the Guggenheim’s spiral form was the staircase of El Caracol (the snail), an ancient observatory at the Chichen Itza in modern-day Mexico. On the right is the Guggenheim itself, which appears to bleed with a river of red paint.

Vicuña doesn’t oppose the usual narratives around Wright’s design inspiration (the Guggenheim website references the incorporation of ‘organic form’ into the museum’s architecture), but instead poses an open question: is there more to this story? ‘Even though I’m not an archaeologist or an art historian, and I cannot say for sure, I wanted people to sense that an artist such as Frank Lloyd Wright also takes his inspiration from Indigenous art.’

With this question, Vicuña is addressing the foundations of the Western art world, specifically the history of the Guggenheim family and the source of its fortune in extractivism. It is noteworthy that a museum now celebrating Vicuña’s life and work had derived its early capital from destroying what the artist fought for an entire career to preserve. She contends that most museums around the world are entangled in capitalist exploitation. ‘The entire world is dependent on the destruction of the world, so it’s something that has to change if there’s a chance of surviving.’ That’s why I bring it up, because every chance we have to bring awareness to the deadly effect of extractivism, is something that every citizen should be involved in’, says Vicuña. ‘We are trapped in this complicity and this “looking away”, pretending that this is not the case. Now we have received the final warning from the scientists that the planet is becoming uninhabitable for humans.’

As León de la Barra explains, Three Spirals is questioning the ‘dependency today of the art system, institutions and artists on extractivist funding which has an effect on our fragile environment and climate change… Cecilia’s message is clear: if we don’t change our destructive ways and our relationship with our environment, our days on this Earth are counted.’

Throughout Vicuña’s paintings and installations are common threads, and they’re often a shade of deep, visceral red. This is red as the absolute core of humanity: life, death, blood, spirituality, the cosmos; the power of the female body, and its oppression. In her paintings and installations, red is murder, wounding, and menstruation, sometimes all at once. ‘The negative view of blood and menstruation is pretty universal. The patriarchy has been instilled in the entire planet, and nobody escapes that. But human culture is far older than the patriarchy. It existed for perhaps millions of years before the idea that blood was shameful.’ 

‘Red is incredibly important. I knew what it meant, this relationship or fascination, but I don’t think it would be in my art,’ she says. ‘

It is for each viewer to decide whether this is the blood of hurt, the blood of murder, the blood of destroying the Earth, or the blood of complicity. When we’re faced with blood, whether it is of our own menstruation or the blood of a wounded person, we have all this ambivalence in our response: disgust, horror, compassion. Red mobilises strange, profound forces within us.’

Vicuña created her first red quipu in 2006, the year that Michelle Bachelet became the first female president of Chile, and the first popularly elected female head of state in South America. Vicuña was unable to vote – the electoral register had been burnt by the dictatorship. ‘I wanted to vote! So I decided I would go up to the glacier that feeds Santiago, and [create] a red quipu at the foot of the glacier for the specific purpose of praying for the awareness of the union of water and blood.’

Another example recently dangled from the rafters of Tate Modern, where, in October, Vicuña will take on the ambitious Turbine Hall commission. Vicuña believes that the ‘very visceral, fantastic response’ to her monumental installation, Quipu Womb (2017), which debuted at Documenta 14 and was recently acquired by Tate, was part of the reason she was selected for the Turbine Hall. 

Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern explains, ‘Vicuña has been an inspirational figure for half a century, championing concerns of ecology, community and social justice which grow ever more urgent today. Her radical textile sculptures combine pressing political messages with stunning visual form, creating a truly unforgettable experience for the viewer – one that resonates with and connects audiences all around the world. Recognition of Vicuña's powerful work is long overdue and I'm thrilled that she'll be bringing fibre art to the heart of Tate Modern for the first time this autumn.’

Given her historical entanglement with London, Vicuña’s forthcoming Tate commission will offer a sense of coming full circle. ‘I have a love for London, where everything was so difficult and beautiful at the same time. The Turbine Hall, in particular, feels like a park, like a public space, and people use it that way. I’m fascinated by that because that’s the origin of my art,’ she says. ‘Whatever I do in the Turbine Hall will continue that spirit of complete fluidity of the public space. Even though it’s inside the museum, people take it differently, perhaps because it’s an industrial space, it belongs to everybody. Experiencing – not telling, but sensing, feeling – is the most powerful way of transmission.’ 

Vicuña’s artworks are living entities, with a gravitational pull stronger than their earthly weight suggests. They are circular, ephemeral, and in a sense, unfinished, much like our existence and purpose on Earth. Their message, at their core, is that eco-activism, feminism, and the rights of Indigenous people are not responses to distinct plights, but part of the same tapestry. Her work is a eulogy to all that’s been lost, and a plea to avoid what might be if we continue on our path of inaction and destruction. 

Vicuña brings the Earth, its people, and its lost histories onto the stage to speak for themselves. Together, they proclaim that what weaves us together might just keep us alive, and the world spinning.

INFORMATION

‘Spin Spin Triangulene’ is showing until 5 September at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, guggenheim.org
Hyundai Commission, 13 October 2022-16 April 2023, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk

ceciliavicuna.com, lehmannmaupin.com

A version of this article appears in the August 2022 Design for a Better World issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

Jenny Holzer’s work has long been an integral part of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s furniture. Her towering Installation for Bilbao (1997) was commissioned for the museum’s opening and dominates its atrium with nine luminous columns, each more than 12m high. Five of the American neo-conceptualist’s inscribed stone benches also form part of the collection, alongside two works made for her 2019 retrospective ‘Thing Indescribable’: a vertical LED sign called There Was A War and the light projection For Bilbao.

Now, the erstwhile Wallpaper* Guest Editor has harnessed the power of AR to take this long and fruitful relationship into a new dimension. Here, Holzer is doing what Holzer does best: democratizing art and sparking intrigue with provocative, arresting, text-based interventions in the public realm for all to experience. 

Like Beauty In Flames sees Holzer’s signature text-based art translated into three distinct AR experiences: two site-specific works that engage the Guggenheim Bilbao’s architecture and one that can be accessed from devices anywhere in the world.

This new, distinctive artwork has been created exclusively for the museum’s permanent collection and inaugurates its three-year plan to present pioneering projects in which technology is at the heart of the art. 

In the open air, AR projections appear on the Guggenheim Bilbao’s façade from five campus sites, in a virtual echo of For Bilbao. Holzer selected texts from different authors for the projections – the artwork’s title, Like Beauty In Flames, is borrowed from Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska’s compelling poem Beauty Dies.

Inside the museum, an AR version of one of Holzer’s LED signs glides through the central atrium, the column contorting and spiralling as Truisms in English, Spanish, Basque and French scroll past.

Like Beauty In Flames can be experienced via a dedicated app for mobile devices, which has been developed by London-based digital agency Holition and is available to download from The Apple App Store or Google Play.

INFORMATION

Like Beauty In Flames is available to download from the Apple App Store or Google Play. 

guggenheim-bilbao.eus

jennyholzer.com

Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about the countryside for years, he tells a captive audience on a blustery New York morning, and it’s time to give it some attention. Koolhaas is introducing ‘Countryside, The Future,’ an exhibition that opens today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It’s a temporally and spatially massive show, the kind of focus on architecture that most practitioners and historians only dream of. And the exhibition, though officially billed as an AMO plus collaborators project, is vintage Rem, almost a greatest hits collection.

There’s the iconoclastic personality, which comes through in a bracing first-person wall text that introduces the show. It points out the exhibition's intellectual origins – an observation that a Swiss village he liked to visit was changing. Pop culture is referenced in the magazine covers that paper the central column. The typical OMA/AMO research-intensive vibe can be seen in the first gallery offshoot, where four categories of books under glass vie for attention with a massive wall-printed text, courtesy designer Irma Boom. 

Throughout the show you'll read an endless series of questions Koolhaas asked himself as he thought about the countryside. A projected map of the world is the exhibition’s iconic image, where the red graphics show areas the exhibition contends with, featuring rotating typefaces of information graphically overlaid. There’s an alarming graphic that shows heat anomalies, and another that shows the sheer number of shipping routes, and, well, much of the show is inherently alarming.

Koolhaas’ argument, such as there is one (the show seems purposefully non-polemical), is that the countryside has been overlooked, largely because of the UN’s observation that, by 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. And that its being overlooked has caused it to be transformed from a bucolic land of peace and pleasure (how he remembered Switzerland) into a sort of weird and un-designed back office/storage room for the world’s cities.

The exhibition, put together with five generations of Harvard GSD students and a host of collaborators from Beijing, The Netherlands, and the University of Nairobi, offers a look into some of those back office mechanisms. Some – like a robotic bee and some lively greenhouses – feel familiar. Others – like a map of China’s political structure (extremely timely), and a look at how Qatar dealt with food insecurity caused by political blockades (also timely given our planet’s very real potential to experience global food insecurity) – offer some of that zing of excitement that we have come to associate with Koolhaas’, earlier in particular, contributions to the field.

Koolhaas, with his firm, made his mark with his book Delirious New York, which he brought up; then another book, SMLXL, and then the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, always staying just one step ahead of what the staid academy expected architectural historians and theorists to do. ‘Countryside, The Future’ feels like the next move in that direction, but it’s also, like his 2003 publication Content was, somewhat messier, a bit, perhaps, historically sloppier; the word ‘antiquity' is used frequently to refer, generally, to ‘the past,’ though it’s clear that the actual locus of this antiquity is only loosely imagined.

Still, that’s what’s on the menu now, in this era of ever-expanding museums and a lay public increasingly interested in understanding the seemingly infinite complexities of our world, whether expressed here through fish farm videos or a moving Stalin robot. It is likely that enterprising students of architecture and future historians will see this as something like a capstone to his career. It’s a bit cheeky, it has its intellectual moments, and – just like the tractor that sits right out front – meant to capture our attention. What the public – or the politicians involved in maintaining all the various orders the show alludes to – does with this attention remains to be seen.

INFORMATION

‘Countryside, The Future’ runs 20 February – 14 August 2020 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

oma.eu

ADDRESS

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave
New York
NY 10128
US

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The largest collection of Gerhard Richter seascapes ever to be displayed is on view from today at Guggenheim Bilbao. The renowned German painter – widely regarded as one of the most important living artists – is celebrated for his masterfully various oeuvre, that contains both sweeping abstractions and meticulous photorealism.

In a world that has already seen myriad Richter retrospectives, here, close attention is paid to the artist's decades-long fascination with the sea, and so offering a new – if narrow – perspective, despite the artist's vast history with solo museum exhibitions.

Richter worked on the Seascapes series from the late 1960s up until 1998, when he produced his finale Seascape (Seestück) – a vast, almost 3 sq m oil canvas, that affixes a tumultuous sea with a peaceful sky. As the exhibition communicates, within this 30-year period Richter’s brush moved with the waves, dancing between moments of melancholy and upbeat vacation snapshots. He once defined these works as ‘absent of opinion’. Instead, they’re philosophical musings on perception; and art's ability to represent the natural world effectively.

As the French photographer Gustave le Grey did 100 years prior, Richter often knitted together two different photographs, in which to base his painting from. He would collage an image of the sky with an image of the sea, glued at the horizon in an illusory composition. They possess the kind of photographic realism early Richter became famous for, but they’re recreating a landscape that never existed, forecasting his later abstract work.

INFORMATION

‘Gerhard Richter: Seascapes’ is on view until 9 September. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb 2
48009 Bilbao
Bizkaia

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Jenny Holzer was 26 when she arrived in New York. The freshman art student at the Whitney Museum had grown up in Gallipolis, Ohio, a sleepy town in America’s Midwest, and had spent her early twenties jumping from place to place in search of her artistic identity. She started out as an abstract expressionist. Then she tried to capture the human form at its most explicit. But she was frustrated; the themes that animated her – sexual and physical violence against women, systemic abuses of power, meditations of love, lust and longing – could not be properly evoked by her canvas.

A year after she arrived in New York, she discovered a way to use language and started to work on what remains possibly her best-known series. Truisms was at first a series of posters: 250 single-sentence declarations on brightly-coloured paper, wheat-pasted onto Manhattan’s streets anonymously and often in the dead at night. Soon after arriving in the city, Holzer quickly became involved in Colab, a progressive downtown artist collective. There she began to associate with a new wave of explicitly feminist artists, names like Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth.

Holzer worked on Truisms for two years. She would distill into one-liners the old, erudite texts from the reading list at the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, where she was a student, and turn them into statements resembling a haiku – something between a bon mot and a confessional cry for help. She would isolate provocative phrases from the academic texts found in the library, re-associating them in a new sequence, imbuing them with a very modern and very radical minority mindset.

By 1979, those in the know were beginning to associate the thought-provoking posters as the work of the young, comparatively shy woman from Ohio. This was a new, public-based and powerfully activist style of visual art. Street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambelton and Keith Haring had not yet been swallowed up by the established art world, while punk was animating youth culture, with the Ramones, New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers a fixture in Manhattan’s dive bars. Standing in the Guggenheim today, that era seems fused into Holzer’s persona, with the 68-year-old resplendent in Converse and an army surplus jacket, her hair falling almost to her waist.

And yet, while punk and street art places in opposition to the mainstream, Holzer showed an ability to take it down from the inside. In late 1980, some of Holzer's street art was included in the exhibition ‘Social Strategies by Women Artists’ at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Two years later, in 1981, she was exhibiting on the electronic billboards of Times Square. She talks today of ‘switching the messages’ of advertising. ‘It’s useful for people to see a message in the street that isn’t advertising, but perhaps has some real importance.’

With the help of the Public Art Fund programme, Holzer used the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on the Spectacolor board of Times Square to take Truisms to the millions who move through one of the iconic commercial districts of the world – a dazzling light-show of advertising and commerce. One of Holzer’s the most iconic statements – Protect Me From What I Want – was beamed out across New York. Associated phrases also shown have had a comparably long shelf-life. Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way, another Holzer phrase, became a rallying cry for the LGBT rights protests in the US, while Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise was used as a point of reference for the #metoo movement.

Now, Truisms is visible in one of the early rooms of ‘Thing, Indescribable’, a quite jaw-dropping retrospective of Holzer’s work at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, and which includes never-seen-before ‘site-responsive’ installations built especially to respond to Frank Gehry’s architectural creation.

I ask Holzer at the opening of the event about the use of her work by the #metoo movement, and how she feels about the ongoing fight for women’s rights when a self-avowed abuser of women sits in the Oval Office. ‘The women are going to win this one, and Trump is going to go away. It’s just not happening fast enough,’ she tells me. You have no doubt, I ask. ‘No, no, no – the women are not going to go back into the back of the cave. I think he’s most inspirational in this department,’ says Holzer. ‘Because if it wasn’t clear before, it is now. He’s tangential [to the women’s movement]. But it’s good to have something useful from him.’

Jenny Holzer in her Brooklyn studio with works in progress.

Holzer has a long association with the Spanish city’s iconic gallery, which last year hosted four of the 20 most-seen exhibitions in the world. In the atrium of the building, visitors still trace their way trough the original installation built by Holzer for the opening of the exhibition in 1997. The art work is made up of nine luminous columns, each more than 12m high. Last year, Holzer gifted to the museum a set of engraved stone benches, many of which have been repurposed for this exhibition.

‘Thing, Indescribable’ demonstrates the diverse ways in which Holzer is able to harness different media to present and distribute her texts, from the monumental to the everyday, the highbrow to the lowbrow. It could be a chunk of marble, a canvas, a gleaming, colourful LED display – or a condom.

Holzer is now based in Hoosick Falls, a tiny village-like commune near the Green Mountain national park in upstate New York. By her own admission, she barely leaves the place. As she’s grown older, she’s become more focused on finding and appropriating the words of others, rather than forming phrases of her own. At the same time, her work has become more sculptural, more experiential. Rather than a poster, we now enter a cavernous space.

In a vaulted, curved room of the Guggenheim Bilbao, we witness hanging from the ceiling an installation titled Sworn Statement. In 2004, the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command (USACIDC) launched an inquiry after reports of abuse at Afghanistan’s Gardez Fire Base were brought to light in the American media. Afghan detainees, witnesses, doctors and American soldiers at Gardez and other facilities were interviewed. Yet the USACIDC investigators ultimately accepted the US soldiers’ denials, and ruled no abuse had taken place. Holzer has taken testimonials from the investigators’ reports and placed them in this huge LED installation, asking us to form our own judgement on how and if someone could invent experiences of abuse like this.

In the adjoining room we come across Ram, an LED sign measuring over seven metres long and attached to a robotic system which draws the work back and forth across the floor of the gallery. Words scroll along each face of the sign at varying speeds. We witness the text periodically flashing, blacking out, and breaking into rainbow spectrums that cast a toxic glow on the surrounding floor. The differing speeds evoke speech patterns, which Holzer describes as the kinetic equivalent to inflection in the voice’.

Ram holds a selection of poems from the Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska, who joined the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War. She wrote about her experience 30 years later, publishing her cycle of 100 poems in 1974. Surrounding both Ram and Sworn Statement are piles of human bones. Inside the next room, two stone sarcophagi, one made from red Ankara marble and the other from Nubian black granite, feature sections of Holzer’s text Laments (1989). Written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Holzer wrote in the first-person to chronicle the voices of unknown and unnamed victims to the epidemic – men, women and children.

Finally, we witness another new LED installation. Titled I Woke Up Naked, the work explores first-hand testimonies from survivors of sexual assault and rape. They’re such massive, almost overwhelming works of art that it might be easy to forget how deep and personal they are to Holzer. But, speaking at the launch, Holzer gives an insight into her own experiences of post-natal depression – a reminder that the ongoing battle for feminine equality remains anything but an abstract issue.

‘When I had my daughter, I had to come out in a different way to be right for her,’ Holzer says. ‘It took me about six years to be where I should have been when she was born. That involves tenderness and an ability to give something sustaining. ‘She’s not as weird as I am now, so it was a little victory, I guess.’

INFORMATION

‘Jenny Holzer: Thing Indescribable’ is on view until 9 September. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48009 Bilbao

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Amongst the many female artists who’ve fallen out of the public eye over the years, Hilma af Klint is one of the more provocative. Born in Stockholm in 1862, the painter began creating highly abstract paintings in 1906, well before figures like Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich found fame doing the same. While the latters’ philosophies and manifestos went on to be widely published, af Klint kept her work private. She rarely exhibited them due to her doubts that the public was not ready to understand them and even stipulated that nothing would be exhibited until 20 years after her death. Thus, her work only started to be shown in 1986 and has only recently begun to receive its just attention.

Hilma af Klint’s oeuvre is currently being shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York – the first major solo show devoted to the artist in the United States. The exhibition focuses on paintings made during from 1906-20, the period where af Klint began producing non-objective paintings. Organised in collaboration with the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, this survey of af Klint’s work is an enticing explosion of shape, colour and symbolism, influenced by the scientific discoveries and spiritual movements of her age.

To celebrate the exhibition, Guggenheim New York has created an exclusive collection of fashion, homeware, stationery and jewellery pieces, inspired by af Klint’s works. Produced with a predominantly female group of artisans and designers, the collection ranges from ceramic vases and incense holders to scarves, t-shirts, bags and a watch, incorporating gestural geometric forms and washes of bright colour.

Featuring the work of Hellen van Berkel (Netherlands), Margaret and Colleen Clines (USA), Ibai Demirdache (Canada), Maya Luz (USA), Karen Konzuk (Canada), Michele Quan (USA) and Michele and Martin Yeeles (USA), the 60-piece collection is certainly one way to ensure that af Klint’s legacy for daring and imaginative thinking remains in tact.

INFORMATION
‘Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future’ is on view until 23 April 2019. For more information, visit the Guggenheim website

Anni Albers’ career spanned two continents, eight decades and half a dozen honorary doctorates. It negotiated personal commissions and worldwide mass-production; bridging the canvas, the loom and the printing press. To stack such a mountain of boundary-crossing achievements, takes a figure of ‘remarkable tenacity and adaptability’, says Manuel Cirauqui, the curator of the Albers retrospective recently opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

‘When she arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, Albers wanted to be a painter, but she was given a spot in the weaving workshop,’ Cirauqui explains. ‘She took it, and ran with it. Then, when forced to move to the US in 1933, she hit the big-time in America’s mass-produced design industry. At 60 years of age, when she had to stop weaving, she adapted again as a great theorist and philosopher.’

‘Touching Vision’ highlights Albers’ lifelong artistic ambidexterity, through a catalogue of examples taken from each of her ‘phases’. Linearly presented, and guided by Cirauqui’s steady hand, we see the queen of weaving’s singular modernist vision unfold across discipline, decade and timezone. The first work we confront, her Bauhaus thesis subject, is laid on top of a glass vitrine, so its textural complexity can ‘rise to the fore’, says Cirauqui, his hand hovering over the threads. Woven in, lustrous cellophane warps across haggard horsehair.

We see a commitment to material experimentation recur in her art jewellery. Defying its luxe appearance, and the source of several double-takes, Necklace (circa 1940) is made from a drain-strainer that gathers a cluster of stretched-out paper clips. Through such pieces Albers was attempting to bring beautifully made, timeless accessories to the masses, through the use of ‘common materials’ that were ‘uncommon to jewellery’.

The Bauhaus-inspired ideology of ‘art for everyone’ permeated Albers’ career, and later informed her mass-produced pattern work, which took off in 1951 when Florence Knoll invited her to collaborate with the Knoll textiles department, leading to a 30-year friendship, through which Albers would bring her stylistic innovation to the textile heavyweight. ‘The collaboration came at a time when everyone had badly reproduced Van Goghs in their living rooms,’ says Cirauqui. ‘Albers thought they should instead have access to high quality reproduced art. She thought textiles was the way to do it.’

The idea reached a zenith in 1976, with Albers’ best known pattern, Eclat, which started life as affordable print-upholstery, before reaching the much-copied global status it has today. For ‘Touching Vision’, Cirauqui lined the back wall of the Guggenheim with great swathes of original Knoll fabrics, allowing them to ripple as visitors pass close by; their hypnotically oscillating patterns waving. Positioned directly opposite, like a reflection, Cirauqui placed Albers’ painstaking pencil sketches of the pattern, so as to show the thinking behind the work. We see how the lines of the pattern interweave, warp and weft, like threads.

At 60, Albers no longer wished to handle the considerable physical demands of the loom, and despite living for a further 30 years, she made a conscious decision to stop weaving, ‘showing an incredible self-awareness and sensitivity’, says Cirauqui. The final work Epitaph (1968), in which you can read ‘a lot of her past, present and future’, is a magnum opus where we follow the story of a tangled golden thread, weaving a complex path through a taut, opaque back plate. ‘She created it knowing she would never be able to make such a vast, all-encompassing loom-based work again.’ It’s a physical representation of her weaving philosophy, embracing both technicality and expression.

Contextualised by pages from her sketchbook, and early examples of the Pre-Columbian textiles that inspired her, this is a show that reaches through the loom, and attempts to unspool the goings-on of her mind.

INFORMATION

‘Touching Vision’ is on view until 14 January 2018. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb
48009 Bilbao Bizkaia

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Over the last 20 years, Bilbao has transformed from a rusty-round-the-edges port town to a cosmopolitan service city. Its pre-existing patchwork of 18th century townhouses and severe Francoist facades has been punctuated by contemporary structure upon surprising contemporary structure.

‘There’s two Bilbaos: the one before Guggenheim, and one after,’ says the museum’s director, Juan Ignacio Vidarte ahead of Reflections, a week-long celebration of its 20th birthday.

Indeed, it seems a roster of the world’s most famous architects have spent the last two decades using Bilbao as their playground. Santiago Calatrava’s white, tied arch Zubizuri bridge (1997), is framed by Arata Isozaki’s The Isozaki Atea (2008), comprising two, 83m tall towers that dwarf the smattering of dock buildings that still cling to the edge of the Nervión.

Elsewhere, Sir Norman Foster’s glass-domed Metro entrance ways, (affectionately called ‘Fosteritos’ by locals) brightfully arch out of the pavement. And Philippe Starck’s Alhóndiga Cultural and Leisure Center (2010) houses a 6000 sq m indoor plaza, peppered by 43 pillars that hold up a glass-bottomed rooftop pool.

Today, Bilbao is a map of contemporary architectural abandon that simply wouldn't have been drawn without Frank Gehry’s cultural calling card 20 years ago. But, as Vidarte is keen to point out, Guggenheim was far from the sole player in this city-wide regeneration. Instead, it was ‘the catalyst for change’ and a ‘beacon’.

Last week, Reflections ignited this great, titanium-coated beacon literally. A 20-minute lightshow, created by 59 Productions (of London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony fame) was projected onto the vast, reflective North-facing wall of the museum each evening.

World-leaders in large scale projection, the artist-led team made use of 3 miles of fibre optic cable, 120 tonnes of equipment, 160,000 watts of speaker power and more than a million lumens of lighting equipment, in a public artwork that spanned a Guggenheim-worthy scale. The thousands of Bilbaínos that gathered to watch the performance paid testiment to the Guggenheim's local popularity. 

At moments, the museum appeared to crumble away into the river, at others, it’s alive with flames. One sequence sees the waves lapping at the hull as the museum is transformed into a giant blue boat; another sees Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider Maman (1999) come alive to spin her web across the facade. The artistry and sheer technological achievement of the production pays homage to Gehry’s masterpiece, and all the others housed inside it, celebrating them as the progressive, city-shaping works that they are.

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Gugenheim Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim
Abandoibarra Etorb
48009 Bilbao
Bizkaia, Spain

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László Moholy-Nagy may be popularly remembered as the photogram man, but if the Guggenheim, Art Institute Chicago and LACMA have anything to do with it – and they do – Moholy-Nagy’s legacy is finally receiving an all-encompassing retrospective to match his totalised, wide-sweeping practice and impact on the arts.

Opening today and running at New York’s Guggenheim until 7 September is 'Future Present'. A co-curatorial effort from the three aforementioned institutions, which travels first to Chicago and then to Los Angeles, the show is the first comprehensive survey of Moholy-Nagy's practice to hit the United States in over 50 years, despite the fact that the modernist period he occupied has fallen back into both academic and popular favour in the last few decades.

Born in a small town in Hungary in 1895, Moholy-Nagy was the consummate modernist, complete with unfaltering utopianism. He was an artist, a writer, a teacher, an intellectual. While his career took him West, first to Budapest, then to Berlin (and Mitteleuropa), onto London and then the US (he settled in Chicago in 1928, where he sadly died young at 51, in 1946), along the way Moholy-Nagy picked up elements of contemporary intellectual discussions, folding them into his practice. Ultimately, he brought Bauhaus to America. Moholy-Nagy’s tutelage under school founder Walter Gropius between 1923–1928 is an oft-cited frame of reference, especially as he became the founding director of the Chicago Bauhaus, but this exhibition actually focuses on his progressive perspective of the modernising world through technology – particularly through his choice of materials.

The exhibition, organised chronologically, begins in the 1920s with Moholy-Nagy’s oil paintings, such as the gorgeous A II (Construction A II) from 1924, echoing the constructivist sentiment that he encountered in Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery; as well as the dadaists, whose playful constructions in collages seeped down into Moholy-Nagy’s photo collages. There, nestled into the Guggenheim’s rotunda, are his early 1920s experiments in laying over negatives to create images in motion, such as The Law of the Series, and Joseph and Potiphar’s Family, both 1925, that not only highlighted Moholy-Nagy’s developing artistic style but also his fascination with technology.

Much of this show portrays Moholy-Nagy’s embrace of new technological tools and techniques, in particular the aforementioned photograms which, while he didn’t necessarily invent, became a signature experimentation for the artist; he often used examples in the battle to legitimise photography-as-art.

But it’s in his paintings where the really subtle technological shifts occur, and his new canvases encrusted in enamel, trolit (Bakelite plastic), aluminium and Plexiglas elevate his architecturally inclined subjects, quite literally in most cases. Take, for example, his later series called 'Space Modulator', such as the 1939–45 version here, or B10 Space Modulator from 1942, where the imagery printed onto Plexiglas is propped up onto a board, thus creating colourful reflections, acting almost as a second painting – or in Moholy-Nagy’s estimation, a 'new vision', seeing the world with new eyes.

However, Moholy-Nagy’s favourite subject and material was light. And this exhibition reconstructs Moholy-Nagy’s 1930 device Light Prop, perhaps his apotheosis as an artist – a sculpture hybrid and quasi-cinematic projection device with which he made moving images that capture light in motion.

Moholy-Nagy was a believer that art served to liberate the individual. His utopianism trickled down not only in his dealings with artistic experimentation but in his pedagogical ideology. Art teaches enlightenment and social consciousness to everyday citizens – that and light were the constant sources of Moholy-Nagy’s ethos and oeuvre. The way he embraced but also wrestled with technology, finds meaning today – a looming takeaway from this otherwise utterly stylish, illuminating show.

INFORMATION

’Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’ is on view until 7 September. For more information, visit the Guggenheim’s website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim
1071 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10128

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Louise Bourgois was 97 when she made the last of her Cell works in 2008, two years before she died.

In Cell (The Last Climb), an open door leads into a rusty wire cage. It’s not a prison but a gateway; inside, a spiral staircase leads up and out of the cage to the sky, and large blue glass balls are suspended like bubbles waiting to float free. At the centre of the cage is a brilliant blue rubber droplet like a giant tear – not falling but buoyed by this sense of floaty lightness – which Bourgeois described as a self-portrait.

For an artist who said she made art as a means of survival and a way of confronting fear, this work, a clear metaphor for death, is remarkably uplifting. It’s not fraught with anxiety, in the way that her works that typically explore unconscious emotions surrounding childhood memories, growing up, sex and motherhood are. Bourgeois worked tirelessly through her 70s, 80s and 90s with an urgent combative energy that one can only marvel at here. Perhaps by 2008 she was finally ready to let go. 

Bourgeois created 60 Cells. Of the 28 on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao, most were created in the last two decades of her life. Each Cell is a world; a stage set to either be contained in, journeyed through, peeked voyeuristically into, or be excluded from.

They are precise, contained, and complete spaces, featuring sculpture and objects that Bourgeois owned or gathered to tell autobiographical stories. Some are more literally based on memories than others. One draws on a memory of her parents' bedroom, another features a marble replica of her childhood home with a guillotine poised above it, anticipating a moment when it might all disappear.

Frank Gehry’s gallery interior, a seemingly endless maze of rooms and corridors that curve and twist, grow and shrink, is an invitation to get lost. That suits Bourgeois’ work down to the ground, because it’s never about what's outside, but always the warped, shape-shifting unpredictability of her interior world.

Like a spider’s web, this world is a place of seductive, horrible beauty. Inevitably you are drawn into it, and as you are you begin to see that the unconscious world she was exploring has its own own internal logic. Repeating symbols – mirrors (confrontation of the self), doors (secrets and safety), limbs (impotence), spiders (the mother) – become a language, which help you to interpret her reality. Eventually a bigger picture emerges. The show, like the body itself, is a place of trauma and escapism, fear and magic: both prison and refuge.

INFORMATION

'Structures of Existence: The Cells' is on view until 4 September. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Bilbao's website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2
48009 Bilbao
Bizkaia, Spain

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Paris-based firm Moreau Kusunoki has been announced as the winner of the Guggenheim Helsinki competition, soon to be the third European outpost of its kind following on from Venice and Bilbao.  

Revealed today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Helsinki, Finland, where the art museum will soon grace the city's waterfront, the announcement has been widely received by the international community with enthusiasm, and an ounce of controversy (mostly down to its hefty price tag: a cool $147 million).

Perhaps one of the most fraught over competitions of recent times, the jury - an eleven-member panel including Studio Gang's Jeanne Gang and Atlier Bow-Wow's Yoshiharu Tsukamoto - received over 1,715 entries from 77 countries. These where whittled down to six finalists and one champion in a radically open and entirely anonymous vetting process. In the running were more than a couple architecture heavyweights (London studio Asif Khan, AGPS Architecture, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Haas Cook Zemmrich STUDIO2050 and SMAR Architecture, to name but a few) but the husband-and-wife firm established only four years ago beat them all to it. 

Titled 'Art in the City', the winning design was chosen for its ability to invite visitors to engage with the museum and its contents through architecture. Nine low-lying columns and one lighthouse-like tower cluster closely, linked by a series of garden patios and an interior promenade. The tower itself is connected to the nearby Observatory Park via a pedestrian footbridge which, along with locally sourced materials, further integrate the imposing property to its surroundings. 

'The waterfront, park, and nearby urban area all have a dialogue with the loose cluster of pavilions, with people and activities flowing between them,' comments jury chair Mark Wigley, professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University. 'The design is imbued with a sense of community and animation that matches the ambitions of the brief to honour both the people of Finland and the creation of a more responsive museum of the future.'