Most Recent Acquisitions

Works by Pello Irazu, Koldobika Jauregi, Jesús Mari Lazkano, and Richard Serra were added to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection, after the Tenedora Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Bilbao, S.L. had given its approval for these acquisitions.

Altogether, eleven works by these artists were acquired: Life Forms 304, 2003 by Pello Irazu, Siege I, 2003 by Koldobika Jauregi, The Curve of Destiny, 2004 and Somewhat More than Infinite, 2001 by Jesús Mari Lazkano and Single Ellipse, Double Ellipse, Spiral OLCR, Spiral Right-Left, Blind Spot Right, Large Spiral and Eight Plate Piece, all to be completed by Richard Serra in 2005.

Together with Txomin Badiola, Pello Irazu (Andoain, 1963) is considered one of the key figures in the renewal of Basque and Spanish sculpture from the 1980s.

His work, closely linked at the beginning of his career to the intellectual and sculptural ideas of artists such as Jorge Oteiza and the formal view of minimalism, both in its appreciation of space and the use of materials, has since taken a more personal path with greater social content. One of the basic subjects of his work is the house — a habitat, in which the humdrum, daily routine is played out — embodied in abstract figures and constructions. The spectator is an important part of the way his works function; in them, outside and inside combine to become an ideal and yet somehow disturbing, defunctionalized place.

In Life Forms 304, 2003, a site-specific installation commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection, Pello Irazu sums up the diversity of all these concepts. In the artist’s words, the installation was created “from my understanding of architecture, in the unique framework of Frank O. Gehry’s architecture.” Here, space is seen as something more than “just a container where things can be left” becoming an element that “mediates between the gallery and the spectator.” The room as living space, as habitat, is defined by a mural that runs along the whole wall with a line, as a sort of discontinuous corridor, on which hang drawing-objects that jostle dialectically for their own space. In the middle is a sculpture that combines unity and solidity with the disintegration and fragmentation of its formal elements, only to reconsolidate in the light of the individual’s claim to a habitable space.

Koldobika Jauregi (Alkiza, 1959) is without doubt one of the most important sculptors in the Basque Country today. Carved in stone or wood, Jauregi’s works usually feature simple forms associated with nature and are the result of constant analysis and reflection on concepts such as space and the passing of time. Jauregi was one of ten artists, including Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies, selected for the exhibition Spanish Art at the End of the Century held in 1999 at the Würth Museum, Künzelsau, Germany.

From 2000 his work has focused on the analysis of the forms and aspects of darkness, the change in perception that occur in the dark, an idea he aims to reflect in his sculptures. The passing of time and the disappearance of the human trace on nature is also present in Siege I, 2003, an artwork that combines sculpture and a bas-relief to delimit a place, a landscape at night. As the artist says, “the night has features. It possesses the intuition that lets us see those features. At night, time slows down, it shuts off our eyes and thoughts and everything becomes sensation and perception. Our steps become hesitant. Vision, our most essential support, is annulled. The sensation is one of everything disappearing. Our ears seem to hear the silence, like we seem to hear the sea when we listen to an empty shell. When all this happens, it is night, the dream of memory and everything is shape and feature. Instead of always shining a light to see or perceive spaces, shouldn’t we perhaps darken them? In the black space, we perceive other sensations that sleep in the light of day.”

Koldobika Jauregi carves wood directly, subsequently applying flame or inks to the surface of his works to remove the traces of the carving process and to free new marks and forms in constant tension between the figurative and the abstract. These forms and marks are signs and traces referring to a remarkably pure synthesis of the calligraphy of the surface and the compact form of the material of the trunk. There, plant life and architectural, prehistoric, Eastern, African, human and built archetypes all coincide.

The works of Jesús Mari Lazkano (Bergara, 1960), a respected Basque artist, portray city- and natural landscapes in a vision that mixes his deep Basque roots, his cosmopolitan spirit, and his interest in the past. Lazkano’s mental landscapes, realist in style, evoke the poetic, slightly melancholic nature of places such as Vienna, Rome, and New York, linking the educated eye of the cartographer with the personal view of the artist.

As Lazkano says, “while painting reflects something that falls outside of the frame, it also reflects everything that arises from its interior. A sort of two-way mirror if you like, showing the external, the apparent, the anecdote, what we know, what we see, what we recognize. In the same way it reveals its inner self, the things it tells us, what we feel, what is hidden behind appearances, the unchanging nature of change, the sublime lurking in the everyday, the transcendental in simple things, the importance of what goes unnoticed.”

Lazkano uses the architectural elements that feature so prominently in his oeuvre to reorder his landscapes and to give structure to the representation of an imagined reality filtered by the memory of the past and personal experience. Through them he explores art history, fashioning his “travel logbooks” with fragments that never existed but which correspond to moments of the past or of the present. In both The Curve of Destiny, 2004, a very large painting measuring 300 x 500 cm to be executed specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao spaces, and Somewhat More than Infinite, 2001 (130 x 225 cm), a gift accompanying the acquisition, the artist brings us up against New York City. In Lazkano’s view, “a city is nothing to us if no-one shows us how to understand it, if we don’t project ourselves onto it. For that we need to learn how to see it, from the most obvious things to the most obscure, from the humdrum to the chance happenings. Everything has to be used that way, even our own photographs or a simple postcard.” The inspiration for these works lies in Lazkano’s fascination for Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York, published in 1939 under the title Changing New York; images from Cast-iron in New York by Edmund V. Grillon; and Lazkano’s own photographs of the city. The two works the Museum proposes to acquire show Mies van der Rohe architectures in imaginary contexts and reconstructed perspectives where the artist represents in extraordinary detail surroundings nuanced by typographical features and lit across by an ambiguously toned light.

The acquisition of these major works by some of today’s leading artists for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection brings the representation of contemporary Basque painting and sculpture to significant completion.

Richard Serra (San Francisco, 1939) is one of the leading sculptors of the 20th century, renowned for his challenging, groundbreaking work that focuses on the production process; the specific characteristics of his materials; and the integration of the spectator into the sculptural space.

Serra has elaborated a project of seven new monumental sculptures which, together with Snake, 1994-1997, will provide a permanent installation for gallery 104, making the Museum a required destination for anyone seeking the fullest possible experience of this artist’s extraordinary and innovative oeuvre.

The unparalleled installation focuses on Serra’s recent series, which expand on the vocabulary he has used throughout his career and further articulates the potential for movement in his works and his exploration of the physicality of space. He has designed an installation that enables the spectator to perceive the evolution of the works, from the simplest ellipse, the basic form, to the most complex, the spiral. Moving through the gallery, the spectator is immersed in the overall experience and, following the sequence of the works, becomes familiar with the artist’s increasingly elaborate vocabulary. Starting with the ellipse, a form already explored in the 1999 Serra exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the artist has continued to use this language to create increasingly complex forms.

He constructs a simple, large ellipse housing a smaller one inside, thereby creating a double ellipse. By connecting the interior of one ellipse with the outer plates of another, Serra generates spirals whose inner space cannot be anticipated from the outside. The last two works in the installation deal with the potential variability of space, which he builds from sections of toruses and spheres to shape environments with an altogether different effect on the viewer’s movement and perception. Shifting in unexpected ways as viewers walk in and around them, these sculptures create a dizzying, unforgettable sensation of space in motion.

The installation is conceived in such a way that, on entering gallery 104, the spectator immediately penetrates the space of the sculpture. The whole length of the gallery is part of the sculptural experience. Each work is sited to ensure a continuous flow. As the spectator leaves one work behind, the spatial field continues into the next to create one continuous experience. Serra has placed each work in accordance with the architecture that houses it, paying special attention to the possibility of viewing the interior of some of the works from the balcony on the second floor; the works respond to the architectural details of the gallery, integrating Gehry’s vision into the flow of force and movement. As Serra says, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is “the only place in the world where I could do an installation like this.”