Present day
30-05-24
Three new exhibitions for the summer
New exhibition program
BBK and the museum welcome the summer with the new exhibition program that, over the next few weeks, will be spread throughout the rooms of the museum.
From June 7, Intermission will commemorate the centenary of the creation of the Bilbao Museum of Modern Art and its trajectory until it became part of our Museum of Fine Arts. It will be followed by The Sota Family, which from June 21 will reconstruct another historical episode of great transcendence for our artistic fabric: the collection and patronage of the family of Bilbao businessman Ramón de la Sota. Finally, the face-to-face between Eduardo Chillida and Godofredo Ortega Muñoz will bring the BBKateak program to an exceptional close on June 25, while celebrating the centenary of the Basque sculptor’s birth.
Intermission, Bilbao Modern Art Museum, 1924–1945 will commemorate the centennial of the opening of the Bilbao Modern Art Museum in 1924, directed at the time by the painter Aurelio Arteta. Years later, in 1945, it was housed in the Fine Arts Museum building, where the collections of both institutions would end up being combined in 1969. The exhibition will extend into eleven rooms with works of art and documentation, much of it unpublished, which will explore key events in the museum’s history, like the acquisition of iconic works, the first exhibitions and the evacuation of the collections during the Civil War. It will also result in the publication of an exhaustive study on the topic by the UPV professor Mikel Onandia.
7 June – 07 January
Will focus on historical collecting through a reconstruction curated by Javier Novo, Conservation and Research Coordinator. Specifically, it will share around fifty important works from this exceptional collection started by the Bilbao businessman Ramón de la Sota y Llano (1857–1936). Francisco de Goya’s extraordinary Witches’ Flight, lent for the occasion by the Museo del Prado, will serve as the chronological backbone organising works by Cornelis Van der Voort, El Greco, Luis de Morales, Eduardo Zamacois, Anselmo Guinea, Adolfo Guiard, Ignacio Zuloaga, Darío de Regoyos, Francisco Iturrino, Antonio de Guezala and Aurelio Arteta, among others.
21 June–13 October
BBKateak programme will close with three rooms devoted to provocative formal comparisons between Eduardo Chillida and Godofredo Ortega Muñoz proposed by the historian Javier González de Durana. This face-to-face encounter between the two artists is reminiscent of the first solo exhibition the painter held in the Bilbao museum in 1957, and the fact that one year later Chillida earned first prize in the International Grand Prix in Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. This also marks the celebration of the Chillida Centennial, which the museum will extend in March with the loan of the monumental sculpturePlace of Encounters IV (1973) from Chillida Leku.
25 June-30 September
On this occasion, the artistic program The BBK Art Route aims to show how 38 artists from the museum’s collection have dealt with the representation of childhood in different themes, styles and periods in the history of art. In the coming months it will travel to 32 towns in Biscay, which will host this initiative for a week in accessible, open-air public meeting places.
