Bilbao Guggenheim Museum spreads Basque art on tenth anniversary

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Juan Ignacio Vidarte, manager of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, alongside commissioners Rosa Martinez and Juan Luis Moraza during the presentation of the events

The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum is celebrating its tenth anniversary with two exhibitions dedicated to Basque art named "Mysteries: Cartographies of Contemporary Art in Euskadi" and " Each to Their Own Taste," to be inaugurated in July and September, respectively.

According to the organisers of the events, "Mysteries: Cartographies of Contemporary Art in Euskadi" wants to explain the development of Basque art. In turn, "Each to Their Own Taste," with Rosa Martinez as commissioner, will be inaugurated in October on the third floor of the museum and will gather the works by 12 artists created for the occasion.

"Mysteries: cartographies of contemporary art in Euskadi," with artist from Alava Juan Luis Moraza as commissioner, will be an exhibition-essay. Visitors will have the chance to see the works of art included in the exhibition from July 6 to September 9 in the halls 301, 302 and 304 of the museum, giving a global view of contemporary art in Euskadi through a series of graphic systems that include different anthropological and esthetical suggestions in an organised way.

The cartogpraphies will display interpretation, production contexts, genealogies, references, routes and evolutions of the artists that are part of the modern and contemporary scene in Euskadi.

Commissioner Juan Luis Moraza tried to gather as much information as possible on current art with the collaboration of notable artists, art historians, cultural managers and museums.

"Each to Their Own Taste"

"Each to Their Own Taste" will be set on the third floor of the Guggenheim, and open from October 16 to April 2008. The exhibition wants to "give visibility and boost local creators, and creators trained in the Basque Country," organisers explained.

The exhibition was "designed to promote the creativity of contemporary Basque artists by inviting them to produce specific works that interact with the exhibition spaces of the Museum. The selection of works will demonstrate that the artists chosen are authors of international vocabularies and respond to and question the tensions of their specific locus," as the Guggenheim reports in its Web site.

"The fundamental points for the critical debate on which the selection of artists is based will therefore include tensions and hybridizations between what is local and what is global, as well as the dialogue between the universalist will of western modernism and the questioning of its values from multiple post-modern subjectivities," it adds.

The name of the exhibition was inspired on Diderot and his idea of language plurality and contemporary conceptual dispersion, at the same time that explores the distance between the purist formalism of modernity and the current multiplicity of tendencies.