Present day
28-01-25

Art to Touch. Visual Accessibility Programme
2025 route and new Vasarely panel
Art to Touch turns the optical illusion of Victor Vasarely’s painting into a tactile experience. This is the new challenge of this visual accessibility programme in which sixty-six schools in Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Álava and 13,367 people have participated over nine editions.
In 2012, Iberdrola and the museum launched Art to Touch, a visual accessibility programme that brings the tactile experience into museographic practice via a device that reproduces a selection of works from the collection in low relief. Targeted at people with visual impairments, other museums like the Prado and the Thyssen in Madrid and the Pushkin in Moscow have also included it in their educational programmes after this Bilbao museum’s pioneering experience.
Art to Touch is based on a technological development by the Bilbao-based business Estudios Durero which enables digital images of artworks to be rendered in low relief. The process starts with a high-resolution photograph; from that, the best compositional elements to guide the hands of blind people are chosen. After defining the volumes and textures, the work is printed with a special ink and a chemical procedure gives the initially flat elements volume. The image of the work with its original colours is then printed on this surface in a suitable size for a tactile experience.
This year, the Art to Touch offerings have increased with the production of a new panel that introduces a nonfigurative work in the exhibition for the first time, an iconic painting byVictor Vasarely, in which the complexity of reproducing abstract geometric forms is compounded by the effects of three-dimensionality. All of this posed Estudios Durero a challenge in how to deal with the size, depth and texture of the shapes with the goal of achieving subtle tactile effects of proximity and distance. The outcome is a panel that translates the complex three-dimensional and optical challenges that Vasarely poses to spectators into a tactile experience, thus expanding this programme’s objective of ‘seeing’ art through touch.
long with this main purpose, Art to Touch also raises all students’ awareness. Guided by mediation staff who facilitate the experience and encourage participation and dialogue, the activity is complemented with support materials like explanatory texts in Braille and awareness masks so that all students can experience the potential of the sense of touch.
Furthermore, each panel is complemented by an audio guide explaining it in Basque, Spanish and English, which is designed to help the students interpret the artworks via a tactile exploration of the surface of the panel.
Iberdrola’s sustained support of this initiative is joined by the collaboration of the CRI-Resource Centre for the Educational Inclusion of Students with Visual Impairments, an organisation which is part of the diversity and inclusion support services of the Basque government’s EducationDepartment and advises the museum’s Education Department on practical aspects of the programme.
The first editions held in the museum were so popular in the school system that in 2018 its scope was expanded by organising a route around different primary and secondary schools in the Basque Country. Sometimes—such as last year in the town of Laudio in Álava—the show was installed in the towns’ Casa de Cultura, which enabled the action to spread to other groups as well, such as lifelong adult education, vocational centres and ONCE groups.
From January to mid-June 2025, a new Art to Touch route around Bizkaia is being launched, with the new panel of an optical painting by Victor Vasarely enriching the exhibition.
In addition to the five originally produced, the number has been expanded in successive editions until the ten tactile panels today:
- Catalan Romanesque. Noah’s Ark (last third of the thirteenth century)
- El Greco. The Annunciation (1596–1600)
- José de Ribera. Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women (c.1620–1623)
- Orazio Gentileschi. Lot and his Daughters (c.1628)
- Mary Cassatt. Seated Woman with a Child in her Arms (c.1890)
- Adolfo Guiard. Country Girl with a Red Carnation (1903)
- Nemesio Mogrobejo. Eve (1908–1909)
- María Blanchard. Femme Assise (Seated Woman) (c.1928)
- Francis Bacon. Lying Figure in Mirror (1971)
- Victor Vasarely. Pal-Ket (1973–1974)
Information and reservations
Department of Education and Cultural Action
deac@bilbaomuseoa.eus
Tel. 94 439 61 41 (Monday to Friday, 9 am to 2 pm)
Regarded as one of the most outstanding figures in twentieth-century abstract art, Vasarely is the main theoretician behind the op art movement. After initially training in Budapest at the Műhely workshop, known as the ‘Hungarian Bauhaus’, he moved to Paris in 1930, where he started his professional career in the graphic arts sector. He began to experiment with perspective, movement and optical effects in around 1947. In the mid-1950s, his style crystallised into a brightly coloured three-dimensional optical art with vibrant effects. Vasarely composed Pal-Ket (1973–1974), a sphere inserted within a square, with the definition afforded by acrylic paint. The precise perspective is placed a grid of flat-coloured geometric patterns to generate a surprising optical illusion of convexity which challenges perception and seems to encroach into the spectator’s space.
Ever since it was founded, Iberdrola has been committed to the development of energy, culture and society of the communities where it operates. To this end, the Fundación Iberdrola España is a further step in this commitment by promoting initiatives that contribute to improving people’s quality of life. One of its focal areas is cultural development, especially the care and maintenance of cultural and artistic assets.
This is the context of its collaboration with the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, which includes support for the Conservation and Restoration programme, the creation of training and research grants in the field of the art conservation and restoration and collaboration in developing educational activities specifically designed to share the museum’s collection with audiences with special needs due to visual or cognitive impairments or in social insertion programmes.