Guggenheim Museum Bilbao exhibits Basquiat

Not just an architectural wrapping, but a series of exhibitions - including a large retrospective of Basquiat - is welcoming visitors to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, one of Frank Gehry's famous projects that has become a real case in contemporary architecture, even coining the term “The Bilbao Effect”.



Bilbao is a city in the Basque country whose fortunes were turned by the iconic Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry, a building that became the symbol for the city's revival, striking at the hearts of the general public like a Hollywood star. So the Guggenheim Bilbao s not just a museum, it's almost a cultural event in itself.



And indeed, most people who have been to the Basque country have seen the Guggenheim Bilbao but they very rarely talk about the contents of this famous wrapping.



We decided to reveal the mystery and share with our readers the exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time” that opened on 3 July and will continue until 1 November 2015. This major exhibition was organised by the Art Gallery of Ontario in collaboration with Guggenheim Bilbao, curated by Dieter Buchhart and Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaza, and showcases a hundred or so works of the New York-based artist who died 27 years ago when he was only 27 (1960-1988).
Until 27 September, the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition engages with the Jeff Koons exhibition, another representative of pop culture to see in Bilbao, although Koons has a very different style and output.
There's no doubt that Jean-Michel Basquiat's artwork is contemporary and timeless - his bold, expressive drawings, covered in words dealing with issues that have lost none of their weight in the last three decades: racism, politics and social hypocrisy.



The title “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time” references Charlie Parker's number of the same name that inspired one of Basquiat's works and is played in another room, and it also borrows from Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream speech of 1963. If you're visiting Bilbao, those same words could be interpreted as an invitation to finally step through the doors and into one the world's most famous architectural icons. 

Christiane Bürklein

Exhibition: “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time”
from 3 July to 01 November 2015
curated by Dieter Buchhart and Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaza
at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Images: Guggenheim Bilbao