Looking for the US at the Guggenheim Bilbao?
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Four American tourists came to see Bilbao’s most famous museum. What they found, perhaps, was something closer to home.
New York enters the Room?
By the third gallery, one of the four American women on the private tour was still talking about everything she had seen last time she visited the Guggenheim in New York. The spiral rotunda. Frank Lloyd Wright. Kandinsky, abstract painting, European modernism, later modern and contemporary works, such as Marc Chagall's, Paris Through the Window, or Pablo Picasso's, Woman with Yellow Hair, or Jackson Pollock's, Enchanted Forest.
This felt somewhat déplacé as we stood in front of El Anatsui's Rising Sea, the Guggenheim Bilbao. But then again, the Ghanaian artist often deals with themes of memory and loss. Many works suggest fragments of history are being stitched back together, so there may not have been a more apropos location within Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim to discuss works of other artists in another museum.
Our Spanish guide, who was doing his best to keep us attached to the work in front of us, received these sidetracks with the equanimity of someone used to meeting many forms of enthusiasm before lunch.
Still, he was right. The large wall-hanging sculpture deserves more than a passing glance.
It unfolds like a vast metallic tide, a surface at once opulent and wounded. Made from countless fragments of discarded metal, carefully joined by hand, the work hovers between sculpture, tapestry, and landscape. Its rippling blues, silvers, and greys suggest water in motion: the shimmer of waves, the pull of currents, and the unstable edge where beauty becomes warning.
Like much of Anatsui’s work, Rising Sea transforms cast-off materials into something luminous. What once belonged to the world of consumption and waste is reborn as a monumental vision of nature under pressure. The sea here is not simply a subject, but a force: restless, rising, and difficult to contain.
The work speaks of environmental change and history. Its broken pieces, stitched together, recall damaged worlds remade through memory and labour.
All six of us agreed that it is a stunning piece, which gives the ocean a body of metal: glittering, fractured, and alive with the uneasy splendour of our time. Or at the very least, that it was awesome, and quite shockingly not something found in the museum's counterpart across the pond.
The Body Gets a Vote
Richard Serra's The Matter of Time got a similar reaction, once the motion sickness and the extended discussion of uncooperative bodily functions had passed.
Before we fully entered the work, the sculpture became a group event. My four companions turned the experience into a social situation, companionable rather than solemn. Someone felt off balance and narrated the entire experience. Someone else felt claustrophobic and chose not to participate. Someone had once had a similar experience in New York. And someone had a theory about inner ears. But passing through the gigantic space was just about dizziness or big metal walls, as I was told: The curves make you feel like the floor is shifting, even though it isn't. It's like the sculpture messes with your body and makes walking through the giant rusty maze more memorable.
Pacing alongside my temporary companions, I was not entirely sure whether my body wanted to cooperate with someone else’s description of what it ought to feel.
Still, Serra's sculpture is a space to be entered, endured, and measured through the body. Made from vast sheets of weathering steel, the work coils, tilts, opens, and closes around the viewer like a sequence of monumental corridors. Its rusted surfaces seem ancient and industrial at once, bearing the colour of earth, iron, and slow oxidation.
As one walks through the sculpture, space seemingly becomes unstable. Narrow passages suddenly widen; curved walls lean inward with a quiet pressure; the body is made acutely aware of weight, balance, direction, and time.
Thus, the title, The Matter of Time, felt not so much as an abstract idea, but as something physical: in the weathering of steel, in the rhythm of walking, in the gradual unfolding of each curve. The work has a severe grandeur, almost geological in its force. It is industrial metal transformed into an experience of movement, gravity, and perception. A sculpture that reveals itself through passage.
Towering lights that talk (back)
The four women moved on quickly. Lots to see. They were lively, sociable, well-travelled, and clearly accustomed to arranging life at a high level of logistical competence. Flights, hotels, reservations, exhibitions, perhaps children now old enough to leave behind with confidence or instruction: they had the air of women who had planned many things and expected them, on the whole, to work. A museum filled with jarring art was not going to intimidate them.
In fact, the nine towering, double-sided LED columns rise more than twelve meters high, slicing through one of Frank Gehry’s irregular galleries like a luminous wall of speech. Their strict vertical geometry stands in tension with the museum’s curving forms, creating a barrier that is both monumental and strangely permeable.
It's hypnotic, bright, and so very overwhelming. Texts pass through the space in Basque, Spanish, and English, carrying fragments of intimacy, grief, violence, memory, and public life. The words come from her Arno writings, originally connected to AIDS research, and they retain that atmosphere of vulnerability and loss.
The effect is at once public and private. These glowing signs recall advertising, news tickers, and official announcements, yet their messages feel painfully human: confessions, laments, accusations, traces of bodies and names. Holzer borrows the language of public information and makes it tremble with emotion.
Disappearing into Infinite Light
They entered rooms with ease, formed impressions fast, and spoke with the brisk fluency of people for whom culture was familiar terrain. A work had barely had time to become strange before it had been liked, compared, folded into another memory, or related to something seen elsewhere. Their attention brightened around names they already knew, especially American ones. The Guggenheim name helped, too. It seemed to operate like good lighting: flattering everything it touched.
Within two hours, they seemed to have completed the museum — not merely the tour, but the Guggenheim and all its contents, mentally checked, absorbed, and made available for later reference. It was impressive in the way that standing at the edge of a room and judging it worth your time can be impressive. Culture had been received, processed, and returned to the itinerary.
So, I, with my own idea of taking time to look at Art, had to walk into Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room. Approaching it slowly, with a certain humility, and preferably without announcing conclusions before the object has had time to become difficult, I discovered that solitude was not necessarily less crowded. Being confronted with Kusama's work felt like stepping inside a thought, a dream, or a private universe made visible. Mirrors multiply the space endlessly, while colored LED lights shimmer and repeat until the room seems to dissolve around you. The body becomes small, almost weightless, suspended inside a field of reflections.
The work is beautiful and slightly unreal. You are present and disappearing at the same time. Kusama’s idea of “self-obliteration” is central here: the self is overwhelmed by pattern, light, and repetition, as if individuality briefly melts into the cosmos.
For a few moments, the self doesn't express an opinion - it just is.
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