The sculptor Eduardo Chillida will be one of the artists with the highest number of works in the exhibition called ARQUIESCULTURA (Guggenheim Bilbao, from 28th October 2005 to 19th February 2006). Chillida-Leku will lend “La casa del poeta” (The poet’s home) in terracotta, “Homenaje a Pili” (Homage to Pili) in alabaster and a scale model of the los Fueros square in Vitoria. Moreover, the Museo de Bellas Artes of Bilbao will contribute with the sculpture named “Gasteiz” (Vitoria) and Urvasco group will lend “Elogio de la Arquitectura” (Praise of architecture). In all, there will be 5 works to resume the long career of this Basque universal artist.

Dialogues between Architecture and Sculputure form the 18th Century to the Present Day

“Real architecture is sculpture”. Constantin Brancusi

From 28 October through 26 February 2006 the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present ArchiSculpture: Dialogues between Architecture and Sculpture from the 18th Century to the Present Day.

ArchiSculpture first opened to the public in winter 2004-05 at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel, Switzerland, and will move to the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany in spring 2006 after closing in Bilbao. Unprecedented in both depth and historical scope, the exhibition traces the relationship between sculpture and architecture from the eighteenth century to the present, from Etienne-Louis Boullée’s project for Newton's Cenotaph (1784) to Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The exhibition brings together a selection of 180 sculptures, paintings, and models of buildings from world architecture by some 60 artists and 50 architects, including Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Kiesler, Louis Kahn, Mario Merz, and Cristina Iglesias. Spanish architects include Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s project “Wang Wei” in Benidorm, and Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón’s architectural model of the León Auditorium.

The most unique and innovative aspect of this exhibition is the direct confrontation of works by renowned sculptors placed beside architectural models of world architecture, small sculptures in themselves, allowing visitors to draw direct comparisons between the two disciplines. Galleries on the Museum’s second floor, and galleries 301, 302, 303 and 304 on the third will house ArchiSculpture, an exhibition that invites visitors into three-dimensionality and discloses a playful way of perceiving new relationships. A thoughtful, careful installation of works by the great sculptor Eduardo Chillida juxtaposed with models of buildings by international architects such as Steven Holl and Herzog & de Meuron, shows how important the paradigmatic function of modern sculpture is to today’s concept of space and computer-animated design.

The exhibition is organized in ten chapters, taking visitors on a journey from the eighteenth century, with Etienne-Louis Boullée’s vision of a spherical cenotaph for Isaac Newton, to Jean Nouvel’s 34-meter multivisionary steel Monolith floating in Lake Murten for the 2002 Swiss Exhibition.