Inside the Museum: The Guggenheim Bilbao

Massive metal walls glisten in the photo below. Can you imagine what’s inside this strange structure? The building and the sculptures shown on these pages are all part of a cultural icon—the Guggenheim Bilbao. Located in Bilbao, a city in northern Spain, the Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997. People travel from around the globe to see the renowned contemporary and modern art collection. More than 1.3 million people visited in 2023! Keep reading to learn about the museum and highlights from its collection.

1997, Frank Gehry

The building that holds the collection might be as famous as the art itself. Canadian American architect Frank Gehry designed the free-form structure. To create the irregular shape, Gehry used glass, titanium, and limestone, making the exterior look spontaneous. When the museum opened in 1997, experts hailed the building as one of the most innovative architectural achievements of its time.

1999, Louise Bourgeois

A massive metal spider stands guard outside Gehry’s sculptural building. French American artist Louise Bourgeois fabricated the spider with steel. Standing more than 30 feet tall, Maman has an air of delicacy, with an enormous body perched on the points of eight graceful legs. The spider’s size is alarming, but Maman is an homage to Bourgeois’s mother. Named after the informal French word for “mother” (or “mom”), the artist emphasizes the maternal symbolism by including a sac of marble eggs hanging from the spider’s abdomen.

1994-2005, Richard Serra

The Guggenheim Bilbao’s largest gallery is cavernous: 430 feet long by 80 feet wide. But that scale posed no problem for American sculptor Richard Serra. The artist composed his monumental work The Matter of Time in eight sections. Serra bent enormous sheets of steel into curving organic shapes. To do this, he worked with machinery that’s normally used to bend metal for the hulls of battleships.

Serra used a type of steel designed to develop a rusty patina, or film, over time. It appears cold and metallic in places. In other areas, it has a warm, velvety quality. The surface texture transforms with the light.

Metal isn’t Serra’s only medium in this work. “I consider that space is a material,” he explains. The negative space—the space around and between the metal walls—is as important as the positive space. This is because viewers exist in the negative space, experiencing Serra’s dizzying sculptures in relation to their own bodies. As visitors walk through The Matter of Time, they feel space and time expand and compress.

1992, Jeff Koons

Outside the museum, Jeff Koons’s Puppy playfully greets visitors. The American artist references 18th-century European topiaries—shrubs or trees clipped into ornamental forms. The work depicts a West Highland terrier. The canine is more than 40 feet tall. Thousands of flowering plants grow upon a stainless steel frame, and an internal irrigation system maintains the floral coat. A team of gardeners update the flowers each season. It takes 20 people nine days to replace the 23 tons of soil and 38,000 flowers by hand!