Page 25 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION
MATERIAL LIFE – FIRST FLOOR, GALLERY 105
In recent decades, the progressive rise of information
technologies has led artists of different generations and
origins to reconsider the materiality of our world, emphasizing
its tangible and irreducible reality with their practice. Through
a selection of works from the last fifty years of global art,
the exhibition, almost like a landscape, presents the force of
this recognition, which is also an inexhaustible reinvention.
The resonance of historic movements like Arte Povera or
Conceptualism is key to the plastic developments of today,
and is felt with special force in the realm of sculpture, without
excluding other media and techniques.

Joseph Beuys. Lightning with Stag in its Glare (Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf
Hirsch), 1958–85. 39 elements. Bronze, iron, and aluminum. Edition 0/4 Guggenheim
Bilbao Museoa. © Joseph Beuys, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Bilbao, 2022

Georg Baselitz. Sunning and mooning in the house of Jeff and Damien, from the series.
Mrs Lenin and the Nightingale (Sonnung und Mondung im Hause von Jeff und Damien,
aus der Serie Mrs Lenin and the Nightingale), 2008 Oil on canvas. Sixteen canvases,
300 x 250 cm each. Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. © Georg Baselitz, Bilbao, 2022

The richness and drama of today’s panorama emerge
indisputably from the amalgam of the natural and the
constructed world, and from its ecological overburdening
and its progressive influence on our lives, but also from the
new science of materials fostered by the rise of technology.
Within this complex framework, Material Life proposes an
Miquel Barceló. Flood (Le Déluge), 1990 Mixed media on canvas 230 x 287,7
x 4 cm. Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. © Miquel Barceló, Guggenheim Bilbao elementary point of view in the strict sense of the term.
Museoa, Bilbao, 2022
Rather like an unfinished inventory, the exhibition follows the
trail of the fundamental elements of nature and observes
their transformations, combinations, and forces. The cultural
discrepancy on the number of elements - four for Ancient
Greece and Baroque alchemy, seven in the traditional
cosmology of China, and five in Indian philosophy - allows an
interpretive freedom from the outset that leaves a great deal
of room for speculation and invention.
The question about the essential ingredients of the world and
their combination is thus openly reformulated again and again.
This room is therefore devised as a possible configuration
of forces and forms, of materials laden with memory but
also strongly present. Converging in it are pieces by artists
like Doris Salcedo, Gerhard Richter, Mona Hatoum, Richard
Long, Asier Mendizabal, Susana Solano, Itziar Okariz, Rodney
Graham, and others.

WORLD of ART 23