BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao opens its 2004 exposition season with a show of Valencia artist Miquel Navarro, acquired for its own collections last March. The work bought by the museum, according to Vidarte, is one of the “most magnificent the painter has done along his career.” As the author himself put it during the presentation ceremony, it is not only its size, but the symbolic and poetic content it possesses. 

The work presented by Miquel Navarro, one of the most important modern sculptors in the world, as Juan Ignacio Vidarte put it during the presentation of the piece, is titled “Rampart City 1995-2000.” It is one of the author’s most representative work and belongs to the collection of sculptural urban landscapes initiated by the Valencia artist in 1973. 

Navarro pointed out that the idea of creating cities, after he had begun painting and drawing in the mid-sixties, came from his wish to “create a universe that fit me.” He believes that his work “may become a part of the sculpture scenery genre, except that it extends as a tri-dimensional shape on the ground.” 

The work acquired by the Guggenheim-Bilbao museum is made up of hundreds of large, medium-size and small parts that symbolize houses, factories, chimneys, towers, skyscrapers, streets and other urban elements that make up a city, placed on the floor of the exhibition room where it is shown by the artist himself and his collaborators throughout four days, in a sequence defined by its creator that represents the various neighbourhoods, industrial or residential areas or cemeteries that may exist in any city of today. 

Miquel Navarro explains that his work contains both vertical, representing the totems erected in antique cities that represent factory chimneys, windmills, sculptures or skyscrapers, as well as horizontal elements, that “wish to symbolize the symbiosis between order and chaos; eros and tanatos.

“Also,”-he argues- it is a symbiosis between human beings and he city, since my cities have a brain, fluids and arteries just as any other human body.”

The work was fashioned with metal parts, an alloy of aluminium and zinc from which lead has been removed because of its contaminant properties. 

Navarro plans to include cars in the next item of his “Cities” collection, intended for a show that will take place in China.

Side by side with his “Walled City,” Navarro installed in the Bilbao showroom another didactic “city” intended for children and students who visit the Guggenheim Museum from February 1 to late in May, when both compositions will be taken apart so children can play with it and carry out their own building and city architectural designs. 

Children may enjoy the visit-shop from Tuesday to Friday, two hours long, for children between 6 and 13 years of age, and another series of free visits for families, aimed at kids between 6 and 11.