THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO PRESENTS TWO NEW ACQUISITIONS FOR ITS PERMANENT COLLECTION
Seascape (Seestück), 1998, by Gerhard Richter and Lightning with Stag in its Glare (Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch), 1958-85, by Joseph Beuys, are two recent acquisitions made by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao for its own Collection. The works will be on show to the public for the first time in the Museum galleries as part of the new presentations of the Permanent Collection to be inaugurated by the Museum in February.
With the addition of these two works, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao now has 60 artworks by essential artists of the second half of the 20th century. The collection includes works by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Eduardo Chillida, Richard Serra, Mark Rothko, Yves Klein and Antoni Tàpies, to name just a few of the major creative artists represented in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s own Collection.
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986)
Lightning with Stag in its Glare (Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch), 1958-85
Aluminum, bronze and iron
Thirty-nine elements
Variable dimensions
Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important artist to have emerged in Germany since the last postwar period. As artist, teacher, activist and visionary, Beuys exercised extraordinary influence over his younger contemporaries who, like him, tried to come to terms with their country’s traumatic postwar history. Beuys’ oeuvre explores the desperation and difficulties facing Germany while attempting to stimulate spiritual renewal.
Beuys’ life and work interweave in a remarkable manner. In 1943, the Luftwaffe aircraft in which he was flying was shot down over the Crimea. A group of Tartar nomads helped him survive; the experience proved to be an essential event in both his life and his artistic production. His description of how the Tartars used fats and felt to heal his wounds and isolate him from the cold is the cornerstone of his work. Beuys rejected traditional models and materials, and made frequent incursions into the scenic world of installation art.
Completed in 1985, some months before he died, Lightning with Stag in its Glare is one of his most powerful and spectacular installations. It is also something of a grand restatement of the themes that concerned him throughout his creative career. Here Beuys revives the themes of apocalyptic destruction and rebirth so characteristic of German historical and artistic traditions, presenting us with his own version of the Book of Genesis inspired in primary images from nature.
Lightning with Stag in its Glare derives from a previous installation, Workshop, from 1982, a huge hill-shaped mound of loam executed to mark the Zeitgeist exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. At the end of the exhibition, part of the enormous mound of loam was molded in plaster and subsequently cast in bronze to transform it into the sculpture of lightning. The inverted mountain, hanging from the ceiling, thus becomes a metaphorical flash of lightning that may well represent the latent energy that lies behind creation. Its form connects this energy to the earth; and it seems to be emanating from the earth rather than from the sky—as is typical of lightning. Ultimately, the work suggests that energy can be transmitted in either direction.
Stag, a 1958 Beuys creation, is a sculpture made of gleaming aluminum from an original structure comprising two rough wooden planks and an ironing board resting on four sturdy blocks for legs. Boothia Felix, conceived in 1967, includes two elements. One is the pedestal, an old sculptor’s modeling base, the other an abstract bronze sculpture. The model for the bronze is the cube of a wooden plant box, whose lateral casing was removed after the earth, interspersed with roots and shards of pottery, had solidified and hardened. Beuys saw the earth cube containing plant roots as a small independent cosmos. Goat, a low three-wheeled barrow, inverts the famous precedent of the goat as found object created by Picasso. Unlike Picasso, Beuys’ goat has no formal relation to the animal and its role in the installation is more a symbol of man and technology than an organic element of nature. Accompanying these objects are thirty-five amorphous animals that represent the evolution of the species and give us a new perspective on the beginning and the end of the universe.
In many ways, the installation may be seen as a last synthesis of Beuys’ oeuvre, particularly as some of the components date as far back as 1958.
Gerhard Richter (1932)
Seascape (Seestück), 1998
Oil on canvas
290 x 290 cm
Throughout his career, Gerhard Richter has explored aesthetic heterogeneity and questioned conventional artistic categories. Using a huge variety of traditional and avant-garde styles and techniques, ranging from abstract to realist, from objective to subjective, Richter combines what are usually seen as opposing pictorial strategies to explore different models of perception.
Richter somehow manages to move successfully between two interests generally considered contradictory. Although he can be described as a “classicist”, in terms of his painterly skills and the use of traditional genres, he also makes prolific use of photography—not necessarily to weaken the painting, but rather to explain the difficult relationship between painting and photography. He approaches contemporary themes of perception, representation, meaning and memory without irony. In his figurative paintings and realist landscapes, Richter uses photography, a mechanic memory for recording images, as a source for the creation of a subjectively represented moment. In his abstract paintings, he works the canvas to give it a photographic emulsion, as if the image were a fuzzy or stained Polaroid photo. Richter’s works frequently distort the images to displace the subject and distance it from reality as a way of reminding us that an image, whether painted or photographed, is just an image.
After painting his first group of seascapes in 1968–69, Richter returned to the theme in 1975, going back to it again in more recent times. Although in some works Richter uses paint in a rather schematic, impressionistic way, his seascapes are always painted quite naturally, with natural colors and smooth brushwork. In Seascape (Seestück), 1998, Richter applies oil paint smoothly, keeping the surface very flat, an effect increased by the mistiness the technique creates. The final image looks very much like a slightly blurred photograph. The sheer scale of the work underscores the immensity of the sea and hints at the smallness of man when confronted by nature.