Bilbao,
The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum has announced today that its collection will now have six works donated to the center by the Daskalopoulos Collection and made by Matthew Barney, John Bock, Kendell Geers, Guyton/Walker, Martin Kippenberger and Kiki Smith. These are sculptures, facilities and paintings that have already been part of the exhibition that Guggenheim gave in 2011 to that private collection, entitled “The Luminous Interval.”
This donation implies the introduction in the Guggenheim of supports so far unpublished in their funds that combine mixed techniques and ambitious scales, and as the museum has communicated also reinforces thematic lines in which he wishes to continue working, such as the decolonial approach that Geers analyzes through his criticism of power systems, or the exploration of the notions of anatomy, gender and identity in the case of Kiki Smith.
The Guyton/Walker collective piece is its first incorporation into the global funds of the Guggenheim Foundation, while Martin Kippenberger’s work comes to consolidate a very relevant set of creations by German artists who worked especially after World War II, such as Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer; With John Bock, Kippenberger shares an irreverent and performative point of view, the playful use of the absurd.
Likewise, the inclusion of Matthew Barney in this group of works will allow to strengthen ties between their practice and that of the aforementioned Kippenberger and Bock: their interest in appropriation, assembly and media fusion.
By John Bock, sculptor, filmmaker, author and cartoonist who reflects on today’s society and social taboos, the Guggenheim Integra Palms (2007), a film that tells the adventures of two German travel murderers in southern California. It is accompanied by an installation that is chaired by a lyncoln whose open hood spills red tentacles. And by Matthew Barney, who investigates the boundaries of the body and the ins and outs Cremasterthat delves into the transformation processes through an eccentric world, full of fantastic characters.
As for the German Kiki Smith, who starts from an imaginary halfway between the scientific and technological to raise poetic reflections on gender issues, his work arrives in Bilbao Field operationcomposed of miniature tables on which organic elements rest. Given his small scale, a change in perception of his own body raises in the public, in relation to the death and transience of life.
Geers’s work, meanwhile, is the result of his experience as a white citizen in the South Africa of Apartheid: as a political activist, his works question politics and racial and religious stereotypes that still survive. The Guggenheim collects Acropolis nowon the dichotomy between the attraction and rejection derived from violence; Work between beautiful and dangerous, consists of a wire mesh with sharp blades of high symbolism.
The Guyton/Walker New York collective, formed by Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, who have been working together since 2004, cultivates artistic practices based on the intersection between art and technology. Your donated proposal is Without title (2008), a group of paint boats with bright colored labels stacked in a corner, between printed canvases: they have applied to everyday objects images and motifs of consumerist nature produced digitally and endowed with relief and spatial dimension.
Finally, Martin Kippenberger developed, until his early death in 1997, a vast conceptual production and marked by irony and controversy. In his opinion, the best jokes were the ones who only had context and not grace, that’s why their painting Without title (the invention of a joke) It reflects a scene without narrative: it will be the spectator who must find his humor.
