The Guggenheim Bilbao Opens Painterly Abstraction ~ Selections From Their Collection

Written by Christopher Woodhead Friday, 02 March 2012 21:20

Bilbao, Spain - The Guggenheim Bilbao is please to present "Painterly Abstraction, 1949–1969: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections', on view until January 8th 2012. Through selected works from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, this exhibition explores major trends in U.S. and European painting in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition features approximately 80 works by more than 60 international artists, including Karel Appel, Alberto Burri, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Piero Manzoni, Jackson Pollock, Antoni Tàpies, and Victor Vasarely, among others. This singular overview of two decades of art reveals the striking affinities among artists working continents apart, in a period of rapid creative development.

The exhibition explores the similarities among different forms of artistic expression that emerged in Europe and North America. Many paintings on view in the exhibition were acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during its second director James Johnson Sweeney’s tenure (1952–60). Since its inauguration in 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has used the art of this period as the essential point of departure for its collection. During the Cold War, numerous stylistic approaches to abstract painting emerged. In response to the devastation of World War II and the rise of existential philosophy, European artists turned to hybridization and synthesis in contrast to earlier, utopian and experimental values. Art Informel, or art without form, encompasses a wide array of abstract practices and painterly methods that emerged in this postwar era.  Painting in the United States was simultaneously evolving toward a gesture-based, highly expressive style.


Like the creators of Art Informel, the Abstract Expressionists were interested in the process and essentials of making art, as well as tapping into their own unconscious mind or emotional states of mind. For artists in Franco’s Spain and Eastern Europe, where oppression ruled even in the aesthetic realms, art signified political liberation. Meanwhile in France, the raw and spontaneous approach artist Jean Dubuffet called Art Brut offered a radically oppositional art counter to official culture. By drawing on the work of those dwelling on society’s margins, Dubuffet inspired alternate paths to abstraction.  The CoBrA group of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam preferred thickly painted surfaces that married realism to lively color and expressive line in a new form of primitivism.

Art Informel, a term coined in 1952 by the French writer Michel Tapié, encompassed a wide array of abstract practices and painterly methods. Rejecting the last strongholds of classical humanism and its most significant artistic principles, such as tonal harmony, balance, and unitary composition, Art Informel embraced artistic freedom and was known in its various manifestations as Gesture Painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Matter art, and Tachisme (from the French tache, meaning a spot or stain). This pan-European movement included artists such as Alberto Burri in Italy and Antoni Tàpies in Spain, who applied nontraditional materials such as sand, rope, rags, and wood to their canvases.Other European artists including Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and Piero Manzoni explored a number of approaches they considered more scientific, objective, and interactive in nature and embraced pure monochrome surfaces. In movements as diverse as Group Zero and Op art, artists engaged the viewers’ senses and explored dematerialization, focusing on optical transformations as opposed to the art object itself.


The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by North American architect Frank O. Gehry, is a magnificent example of the most groundbreaking architecture to have come out of the 20th century. The building itself is an innovatively designed architectural landmark that creates a seductive backdrop for the exhibition of contemporary art. The permanent Guggenheim collections are comprised of the works belonging to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the works acquired through the program of commissions at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, as well as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao's own collection. Together, the collections offer a comprehensive overview of the visual arts of the 20th century. The collaborative programming of the various Guggenheim museums, including shared access to each of the art collections, constitutes a new model for museums, presenting the art to the public in a dynamic and ever-changing way. Works are not exhibited in fixed places within one museum; the Guggenheim network allows them to present more complete and diverse views of the art of our time. For the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the ability to access additional collections, from the earliest avant-garde to contemporary art, provides a unique opportunity to feature masterpieces that would be otherwise unavailable to a new museum. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es

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