- Dates: November 20, 2020–May 23, 2021
- Curator: Megan Fontanella, Curator, Modern Art and Provenance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Sponsored by: Fundación BBVA
- Drawn primarily from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s rich holdings, this comprehensive exhibition traces along four geographic sections the aesthetic evolution of Vasily Kandinsky, one of the foremost artistic innovators of the early twentieth century.
- Kandinsky set out on a crusade against conventional aesthetic values and discovered a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity,” in a dream of a more spiritual future through the transformative powers of art.
- As his calligraphic contours and rhythmic forms revealed scarcer traces of their representational origins, Kandinsky began to advance abstraction and elicit what he called the “hidden power of the palette.”
- For Kandinsky even the most abstract forms retained expressive, emotive content: the triangle embodied active and aggressive feelings; the square, peace and calm; and the circle, the spiritual and cosmic realm.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Kandinsky, a comprehensive exhibition of paintings and works on paper of artist Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) drawn primarily from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s rich holdings. Sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, the exhibition traces the aesthetic evolution of a pioneer of abstraction, a renowned aesthetic theorist, and one of the foremost artistic innovators of the early twentieth century. In his endeavor to free painting from its ties to the natural world, Kandinsky discovered a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” that would remain his lifelong concern.