BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Arts of the Earth, an ambitious exhibition that explores the way contemporary art interacts with the soil as a material space and shared ecosystem. In line with the Museum’s institutional commitment to environmental sustainability, Arts of the Earth offers a multidisciplinary, diverse cartography of art forms — including the visual arts, architecture, design and crafts — that provide a snapshot of the inventory of tools, possibilities, and future scenarios in the face of climate change and the ecosocial crisis our planet is experiencing.
The show underscores collaboration and co -creation with ecosystems as alternatives to the mere extraction of resources or modification of materials, considering today’s concern with the health of our planet and in particular with the survival of the soil — its living, sensitive, fertile matrix — as the core of a survey of artistic expressions through planetary geographies. Thus, the exhibition connects artifacts crafted with soil, wood, leaves, roots, and plants — ancestral media that have newfound importance today — with land interventions that cannot be pigeonholed by established movements and trends. Spanning a wide range of approaches to natural action, from Land Art to Arte Povera and activist conceptualism, the exhibition examines many of the ways humans seek to express their synergies with the Earth’s living processes.
Artists from multiple recent generations and radically diverse cultures have wondered how to work with the earth when it most needs care and repair; how to appreciate and pay back its gifts; and how to learn from what it offers at a time when it appears to be being stripped of its biological, mineral, organic, and chemical richness. The constructive potential of the soil and the substances comprising it go far beyond the classical formulations of sculpture, architecture, design, and landscaping. In recent years, many creative practices have experimented with the dynamic of the soil substrate by integrating composition and composting processes, drawing lines and revealing the shared roots of culture and agriculture, form and terraforming.
Arts of the Earth brings together artworks from the past century until today, along with documents and objects drawn from the wisdom of the Basques and other ancestral cultures. It examines media like sculpture, installations, drawing, and performance, in addition to an extensive selection of archival materials, architectural scale models, design works, and traditional crafts: practices that collaboratively summon knowledge and ritual, and with which Arts of the Earth will attempt to illuminate the intersections of culture and agriculture.
Artists in the exhibition
In its cross -cutting survey, Arts of the Earth presents works by Claudia Alarcón, Vicente Ameztoy, Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys, David Bestué, Heidi Bucher, Gabriel Chaile, Mel Chin, María Cueto, Patricia Dauder, Mar de Dios, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Haacke, Agustín Ibarrola, Inland/Campo Adentro, Richard Long, Ana Lupas, Isa Melsheimer, Ana Mendieta, Asier Mendizabal, Fina Miralles, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Delcy Morelos, Frederick Ebenezer Okai, Dennis Oppenheim, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Claire Pentecost, Perejaume, Solange Pessoa, Benedetta Pomp ili, Asad Raza, Oscar Santillán, Jorge Satorre, Daniel Steegman Mangrané, Tomás Saraceno, José María Sicilia, Michelle Stuart, Paulo Tavares, Unión Textiles Semillas, José Luis Uribe, Sumayya Vally, Meg Webster, and Héctor Zamora.
Galleries 205, 206, 207
The tour through the exhibition begins with historical recognition of several figures who may have intuited, prefigured, or embodied the mutation that art was to undergo in the late twentieth and early twenty - first centuries as a result of climate change. Certain artists take the role of early emissaries, like Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys with their delicate collages or Jimmy Lipundja, an artist from the Milingimbi nation in Australia, with his paintings on tree bark that depict mythical visions closely linked to his native biome. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the development of ephemeral works in the landscape, like those by the Romanian artist Ana Lupas, the Catalan Fina Miralles, and the Cuban Ana Mendieta, converge with the production of anti monumentalist sculptures made of sand, substrate, or straw, like the ones by the celebrated US sculptor Meg Webster and the Italian Givanni Anselmo.
Experiences constructed or dreamed from the body of the Earth urgently articulate a material truth that runs counter to our sense of cultural property, giving way to contemporary art expressions in an expanded present, including dramatic modifications of the architectural space, like the intervention that Colombian artist Delcy Morelos specifically created in the Museum’s gallery 206. This telluric space, almost an earthen abyss, is one of the exhibition’s tours de force .
During Arts of the Earth, galleries 206 and 207 are subject to a special light, temperature, and humidity protocol so they can house and ensure the wellbeing of living species. In gallery 207, visitors will find botanical compositions like the historical living sculptures by the legendary conceptual artist Hans Haacke. His grass sculptures, including a large conical mound, are accompanied by a selection of “Wardian Cases” by German artist Isa Melsheimer, alongside the installation Root Sequence. Mother Tongue by American -Pakistani artist Asad Raza. This work brings together 26 trees of multiple species which will be replanted in the Basque Country after the exhibition ends. The installation will also host various performances and activities during the five months the exhibition will remain open.
Gallery 209
Arts of the Earth also devotes significant space to countless versions of earthworks in any of their states and compositions: clay, sand, and experimental or hybrid blends that include natural and industrial elements. At times, these are hybrids of clay, cement, or metal prostheses, through which a natural dynamic or a transformation process struggle to make their way. This is the case of works by Ghanian artist Frederick Okai and Mexican Héctor Zamora; experiments with extraterrestrial soil compositions by Equatorian Oscar Santillán; and the celebrated adobe sculptures by Argentinian Gabriel Chaile, who also made a large charcoal mural directly on the Museum’s walls.
In some cases, these production processes or material searches take place very close to the Museum, with mud and clay that are closely tied to the local landscape, such as the pottery by the Bilbao artist Mar de Dios, which is made with clay from Bizkaia, and the modular works by David Bestué, which were produced for the occasion using mud from the Nervión River. The exhibition also showcases the results of decomposition processes or the alteration of sculptural bodies in the subsoil in works by Patricia Dauder and Jorge Satorre.
Coexisting with these types of works are the textiles made by artists who cooperate with animal or plant species, exemplifying networks of mutual assistance and common survival. Thus, we find the huge abstract landscapes by Asunción Molinos Gordo made with a blend of wool from all the sheep breeds on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as an installation of swallow nests scattered through different parts of exhibition; color explorations of Amazonian biodiversity in the work of Susana Mejía; and compositions woven by the community of Wichí women from Argentina’s Gran Chaco represented by the artist Claudia Alarcón and the Unió n Textiles Semillas.
Galleries 201, 203
The exhibition inevitably embraces the study of the complex realities of the Anthropocene and the remediation or confrontation strategies of the ecosystems transformed by human action over the centuries, and more quickly in the recent decades of our planet ’s history. Thus, we see remediation works such as the ones by the pioneer Mel Chin, the first artist to have created an intervention for the purposes of plant remediation in the United States landscape entitled Revival Field (1989– present). The show includes the recent project Grains of Paradise by South African architect Sumayya Vally, which reconstructs the migratory history of seeds between colonized territories and their European metropoles.
The study of ancient Amazonian biotope maintenance practices is at the core of the inquiries by the Brazilian artist and architect Paulo Tavares and echoed in the revival of ancestral practices and wisdom by the Inland/Campo Adentro collective in the north west Iberian Peninsula. Composting cultural objects in the earth, exemplified by works by Claire Pentecost and Asier Mendizabal, contrasts with studies of the ecosystem that renegotiate the distance between the symbolic and the useful: from the Land Art pioneer Dennis Oppenheim to the recent practice of experimental engineering by Tomás Saraceno and the constructive, sustainable, situated experiments put into practice by the Architecture School of Talca, Chile, and documented by the filmmaker and architect José L uis Uribe. Artifacts, amulets, and tools originally from the Basque Country — pieces from the past century from local ethnographic collections — as well as from other living traditions in Spain resonate with artistic expressions from other communities that are active on the planet, bringing together iconographies both new and old.
Gallery 202
In the large gallery at the end of the route, Arts of the Earth offers a meditation on the possibility of “sustainable art” as a future already experienced by modern abstraction. At either end of the gallery are works by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone and the Basque Agustín Ibarrola. The former, a living proponent of Arte Povera, presents one of his first and most emblematic trees carved into the large trunks of other trees, as well as a large glass fingernail resting on thousands of laurel leaves, which occupy the exhibition space both olfactorily and visually.
The selection of works by Ibarrola, in turn, illustrates the experimental richness of the practice of an artist who in the early 1980’s took a radical ecological turn in his work, which until then had been eminently urban and political. All over the gallery, forms at once fragile and primeval materialize in abstract pieces like the ones by Michele Stuart, María Cueto, and Richard Long. The quest for volume, by listening to the earth or as part of a nomadic composition process, becomes palpable in works of impressive stillness like the ones by Solange Pessoa, Gabriel Orozco, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, which express the metamorphosis of the mineral into the animal world.
