Current temporary exhibitions at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Juan Muñoz: A retrospective 27th May – 5th October 2008
In 1984, Juan Muñoz’s (1953 - 2001) first solo exhibition, held in his home city of Madrid, featured a small winding staircase topped with a balcony, resting against a wall. Muñoz said that this work was "the first piece I recall with which I had a certain feeling of identity." This architectural motif would recur throughout the artist’s career and now more than two decades later, this sculpture is part of the most important international retrospective of Muñoz’s work, an exhibition of more than 80 works including sculptures, installations, drawings, radio plays, and writings, some never before seen.
Borderline May 20th - October 5th 2008

In the increasingly theoretical New York art world of the 1960s, painting was largely displaced in favour of sculpture, concept was privileged over material, and idea over sensory qualities. Minimalist artists employed non-hierarchical, mathematical regularity to compose hard-edged, unitary geometric forms, and called for pristine, monochromatic surfaces that appeared untouched by the artist’s hand and announced their status as self-referential objects. By the 1970s, however, Post-Minimalist artists began to expand this aesthetic with their explorations of the psychical and physical processes involved in the actualization of art, and a new focus on their objects’ materiality and the conditions of their construction. The eight paintings and one sculpture included in Borderline highlight the ways five different artists navigated this transitional moment.
Laboratories – Miquel Navarro´s “Tu mundo, tu ciudad”
September 16th 2008 - January 11th 2009
Beginning in Autumn of 2008, Hall 103B will host a new edition of Laboratories, the series of educational exhibitions designed around works belonging to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao collection. The museum offers visitors and students a unique opportunity to acquire an in-depth knowledge of a variety of the collection’s works. By presenting a work of art together with the context of its creation, the museum offers a new perspective on the artist’s interests, aesthetic, and formal preoccupations. Parallel educational programs accompany the presentation, including workshops for students, talks for museum members, and guided tours given by the artists.
On this occasion, the museum presents Miquel Navarro’s work Tu mundo, tu ciudad (Your World, Your City) (2003). Miquel Navarro is internationally renowned as one of the exponents of Spanish contemporary sculpture. This exhibition examines his oeuvre from an educational perspective, with the added bonus that the artist will actively participate in designing and producing the event Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections
April 29th 2008 - February 8th 2009
A major development of recent art history, installation art came to prominence in the early 1990s as a mode of art production centred on the creation of an immersive physical experience. Looking back to the pioneering Happenings of the 1950s, as well as Minimalist and Post-Minimalist artists like Richard Serra, artists in the 1990s expanded the work of art into a multimedia environment. The four works presented in this exhibition highlight the multiple possibilities of installation as a means of artistic expression. These works transform the museum space into an open-ended area where visitors can enter and explore new worlds constructed from multiple mediums. Through these installations, the artists invoke social interaction and evoke notions about contemporary identity, personal mythology, and the unknown aspects of the world that surrounds us.