The Guggenheim

I arrived on Sunday afternoon in Bilbao after a relatively uneventful flight. It is amazing how nice it is to arrive at the airport and have your scheduled flight both exist and leave on time. For me, that is a rarity these days. Anyway, after finding the bus from the airport to town, asking a few people and walking 20 minutes or so, I found my hotel. Best of all, I did all of this without uttering a word of English. As it turns out, my hotel is rather pleasantly located only about 10 minutes from Guggenheim Museum. So, after dropping my stuff off and puzzling a bit over the remaining clues from the New York Times crossword puzzle I had picked up on the plane, I headed off to see the museum.

I started in a room where was one room with some work from the Guggenheim permanent collection. The particular pieces I really enjoyed were by artists named Matthew Ritchie and Javier Perez.

Perez had designed a mask and garment for a street festival in Brazil. They were both stored in a separate room from anything else with dim light except for a spotlight shining on the white garment hung on the wall and the gray mask suspended in the middle of the room. The garment was a simple white linen robe that hung gracefully. The mask was made of braided pieces of gray rope with small almost translucent strands sticking out all the way around it. The face had a rather horrifying expression, and the whole room left me feeling rather haunted. It certainly had the desired effect and it was interesting to think of how the lighting and design had elicited those emotions.

The Ritchie piece was a large, sprawling piece that seemed to me to model quite well the combustion and chaos of the cosmos. It featured a large, steel sculpture full of interweaving lines in the form of waves suspended above a cardboard mat with similar structures but done in various colors. Protruding through the holes formed by the steel waves were thin steel rods with small round objects welded to the tops of them. Surrounding the sculpture were both brightly colored paintings and a black and white wall mural featuring similar interweaving patterns and small, ill-defined protrusions. The whole exhibit felt vibrant and alive, so it left me feeling energized and refreshed.

The main exhibit features several rooms of work by Cy Twomby. Apparently he is from Lexington has been producing art for over 50 years. The pieces were often centered around creating something with inherent natural beauty in unexpected ways. He had sculptures made of discarded wood and plaster which me made to look like growing plants, gigantic paintings of bright flowers filled with texture and color and depictions of water from simple, repeated patters. It is always interesting to me to see esteemed art that has been created through rather simple means. Some of the pieces portrayed the great skill and techinique this artist had crafted, but some seemed strewn with random flickerings of paint or carelessly drawn scratches a child could make. Of those that seemed simple, some when viewed from a distance revealed new layer of depth or perspective I would not have suspected or thought about. However, some did not connect with me in that way and the simplicity of the piece drew me a little bit out of the exhibit as a whole. Overrall it was an impressive body of work spanning several galleries as well as decades, which left me thinking about the beautiful symmetries and textures in nature we so often take for granted and how they are present in many unexpected forms around us all the time.

The permanent collection is a series of large, steel sculptures by Richard Sera. These pieces are interactive in the sense that you can walk through them and experience how the geometry and coloration of the walls paired with the lighting shifts your perception of space. Many of these pieces would curve in a direction with one wall curving having an inward or outward bulge and the wall opposite bulging similarly. As these things twisted and turned it would shift the space you were in, alter your relationship with them and change your perception of words like middle or straight. Plus, the walls would tower above you making you feel small and confined, though from the outside the objects seemed perhaps only 12-15 feet high. Some of them would spiral, some were simply bent straigh paths and each had a unique shape and curvature so each created a different sensation when exploring their interior geometry.

The building itself is rather beautiful and full of interesting geometries. Even though it is a giant stainless steel piece of abstract art, it rather seamlessly blends into the surroundings and to the river below. It was a great start to my trip, though I wish someone was here to share it with me. Tonight I was going to head to a paella place a friend recommended near the museum, but due to an accident on the highway delaying my bus and difficulties getting the internet set up in my room, I left for dinner later than I intended. So, I simply went to small place near the University. However, I have the whole week so hopefully I will get to tell the story of the paella restaurant on the river another night.