- Dates: 29 February – 23 August, 2020
- Curators: Germano Celant, curator, and Manuel Cirauqui, curator of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Halfway between painting and sculpture, Artschwager develops a unique language using the new domestic materials of his time, always working toward the fusion of figuration and abstraction, artistic innovation and design, and ironically seeks to combine the functional and the useless.
Designed as an open labyrinth, the exhibition features a comprehensive selection of paintings and sculptures dating from the early 1960s to the first decade of this century.
Artschwager represents places, scenes from everyday life, and common objects such as tables, chairs, and dressers, interpreting them in ordinary, standardized industrial materials such as Formica, Celotex, acrylic paint, and rubberized horsehair.
Artschwager’s work continually questions appearance and essence, offering us a delicate and realistic, humorous yet monumental interpretation of the world.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the exhibition Richard Artschwager, a unique occasion to survey the creative career of Richard Artschwager (Washington, D.C., 1923 – Albany, New York, 2013), an artist who worked halfway between painting and sculpture and who developed a unique language using the new domestic materials of his time. This ambitious project, conceived by world-renowned curator Germano Celant and co-organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and MART – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, comprises almost 70 pieces alongside a selection of
rarely-seen archival documentation.