Bilbao Fine Arts Museum launches groundbreaking digital knowledge platform
The museum inaugurates its new platform with the digital premiere of an unpublished 17th-century view of Bilbao, recently acquired.
BILBAO.—
The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum has unveiled what it calls its “other expansion”—a pioneering digital platform designed to open the doors of its vast collections, archives, and curatorial knowledge to the world.
While the museum’s physical expansion, led by Norman Foster and Luis María Uriarte, is transforming its architecture, this parallel digital leap is set to redefine how audiences connect with art, history, and culture.
A Museum Without Walls
The new platform, hosted at bilbaomuseoa.eus, functions as an ambitious knowledge graph powered by semantic technology. This means that for the first time, thousands of works of art, bibliographic records, historical documents, and archival materials are interlinked in a single digital ecosystem. Visitors can now move seamlessly from a painting to the biography of its artist, from there to a related exhibition, or even to critical essays and multimedia content.
“It’s about creating a museum without walls,” says project lead Irune Martínez. “We want our audiences to explore freely—whether they’re art lovers discovering Bilbao for the first time or scholars looking for detailed historiographic information.”
From Hidden Archives to Global Access
One of the most exciting aspects of the launch is the unveiling of more than 70,000 digitized archival documents. Many of these records, previously tucked away in the museum’s vaults, are now available to the public for the first time. They include critical papers from art historian Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea, painter Isabel Baquedano, and even a previously unseen collection from Le Corbusier.
The platform also incorporates the Arteder section, a kind of living encyclopedia featuring entries on architects, critics, galleries, collectors, and associations that form the backbone of the Basque and Spanish art ecosystem. Meanwhile, the Stories section highlights milestones from the museum’s history and offers fresh perspectives, such as essays by writer Kirmen Uribe.
A Digital Premiere: 17th-Century View of Bilbao
To mark the launch, the museum is offering a digital premiere of a newly acquired, unpublished 17th-century view of Bilbao. The painting provides a rare glimpse of the city in its early modern era and exemplifies how the platform will serve as a bridge between the past and present.
More Than Numbers
The scale of the project is impressive:
• 6,600 works of art
• 1,300 artists represented
• 57,000 bibliographic references
• 700 exhibitions documented
• 300 activities and 400 multimedia files
• 500 news items
Each number represents a door to discovery, whether you’re searching for an artist by period, style, or technique, or diving into the cultural relationships that shaped the museum’s legacy.
Building a Global Community
The museum’s digital strategy goes beyond access; it aims to foster a vibrant, participatory online community. By consolidating its collections and archives in one intuitive platform, the museum hopes to not only attract scholars but also inspire casual visitors to eventually step into its physical galleries.
“This is not just about looking back,” notes digital curator Sònia López. “It’s about creating new pathways for dialogue between art and society.”
