BILBAO, SPAIN.- Passages: Beuys, Darboven, Kiefer, Richter is a Guggenheim Museum Bilbao exhibition featuring works by four leading German artists from the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see key works by these internationally-acclaimed artists from the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Bilbao itself, plus a number of works, such as Beuys’s Multiples and a selection from Richter’s Atlas, loaned by other museums.

Occupying the Museum’s entire second floor, the exhibition is the latest example of the Guggenheim organization’s ongoing commitment to selecting and exhibiting the work of these artits. Dating back to the 1979 Beuys retrospective mounted at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this undertaking has resulted in Hanne Darboven being commissioned in 2006 to produce work for the Deutsche Guggenheim and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s acquisition of works by Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Richter for its own Collection.

This new presentation is the perfect accompaniment for the current exhibitions of selections from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Permanent Collection. Like Passages , Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time, in the Arcelor gallery; Color Field Painting, a significant choice of works in an idiom Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction, in gallery 103 and the exhibition of Arte Povera, Land Art and Neo-Expressionism, now on view in gallery 105, all provide a deeper insight into the relationship between the art produced in the US and Europe in the post-war period.

Despite differing in theme and approach, and using a whole range of media and styles, from large-scale Expressionist paintings and sculptures to conceptual works distant from emotional registers, the works on display in Passages share their authors’ interest in recording their era and the highways and byways of social, cultural, political and artistic history after World War 2.

Joseph Beuys and the renewal of the spirit
On view in galleries 205, 206, 207 and 208, the works of Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921–D�sseldorf, 1986) retained aspects of Fluxus (a movement with which he was associated in the 1960s) such as performance and the privileging of social issues. However, Beuys’s unique outlook evolved throughout his career, informed by diverse sources including German history, Shamanism, and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, which postulates the ability of the human intellect to contact spiritual worlds. His awareness of alchemy led him to associate particular materials and forms with potential transformative qualities. Fusing art and artifact, Beuys assembled groups of objects, both found and created by him, in glass and metal cases similar to those found in anthropological museums. From his first sculptures and drawings of the mid-1950s to his final environmental installation of 1985, Beuys created an intricate, m�dium-spanning body of art. One of Beuys’s most theatrical installations, Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch (Lightning with Stag in Its Glare, 1958–85), articulates the German artist’s obsession with the earth, animals, and death. Completed in the year preceding the artist’s death, this monumental work comprises a number of theories and mythologies from which Beuys drew throughout his career, yet the meaning of this complex installation may ultimately be located within his definition of “social sculpture.” Drawing from the natural sciences, philosophy, and the occult, Beuys interwove his oeuvre with recurring instances of felt, fat, copper, and iron; hares, stags, and bees; ritual healing and alchemical transformation; and an ever-developing utopian political philosophy. Key within Beuys’s art practice was the production of editioned works, or multiples, of which this exhibition contains more than 550. Describing their “vehicle quality,” he saw these works as the best means of widely disseminating his ideas. Because intuition played an important role in his thinking (as a corrective to reason), the multiples, like his other works, took on a host of abstract forms, appearing as sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, audiotapes, and postcards. Shown individually or in dense clusters, they create endless linkages between themselves and the outside world, wrapping all of reality within Beuys’s shamanistic worldview.

Hanne Darboven and the passage of time
One of the most important German artists since the 1960s, Hanne Darboven has for decades produced handwritten “number constructions” as her primary mode of expression. For this German conceptualist, numbers not only represent an artificial, universal language, but also allow her to mark the passage of time. In 1973, Darboven started including texts by various authors, among them Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre, in her work. By 1978, she was also incorporating visual documents, such as photographic images and assorted objects that she found, purchased, or received as gifts. As an artist totally focused on time and deeply committed to the theme of the century, Darboven naturally turned her attention to what that moment meant for her as an individual, and on a more universal level, what one could say about art in the 20th century. In her commissioned installation for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Hommage � Picasso (2006), Darboven creates a daily record of the 1990s. Exactly 270 text panels filled with calendrical representations of the final decade of the 20th century cover the walls of the gallery. Other elements of the exhibition include a series of sculptures related to the work of Pablo Picasso, who is often thought to be the preeminent 20thcentury artist, and a 120-part musical composition, Opus 60. This unusual work is simultaneously a portrait of the end of the 20th century and a self-portrait of Darboven as an artist, issues she investigates through the invocation of Picasso.

Anselm Kiefer: Irony and German History
Born in Germany just months before the final European battle of World War II, Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 1945) grew up witnessing the results of modern warfare and the division of his homeland. He also experienced the rebuilding of a fragmented nation and its struggle for renewal. Kiefer devoted himself to investigating the interwoven patterns of German mythology and history and the way they contributed to the rise of Fascism. He confronted these issues by violating aesthetic taboos and resurrecting sublimated icons. His paintings—immense landscapes and architectural interiors—invoke Germany’s literary and political heritage. References abound to the Nibelungen and Wagner, Albert Speer’s architecture, and Adolf Hitler. During the 1980s, Anselm Kiefer became one of the foremost representatives of Neo-Expressionism, an approach characterized by violent, gestural brushwork and a return to the personal. His large-scale works, infused with references to both the German romantic tradition and his country’s political heritage, combine a nearly monochromatic palette with mixed media, including the application of materials such as strips of lead, straw, plaster, seeds, ash, and soil. The result is an oeuvre whose monumental scale and rich interplay of textures heighten the solemnity and transcendental nature of its contents. Beginning in the 1990s, after two decades of dealing almost exclusively with the horrors of the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past, Kiefer began to explore a more universal set of themes, still based on religion, myth, and history, but now focusing on the spirituality of man and the internal workings of the mind.