Snake by Richard Serra - Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

A visit to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art in Bilbao (Biscay), Spain. It is one of several museums affiliated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists. It was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, with an exhibition of 250 contemporary works of art. It is one of the largest museums in Spain.

The building, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, was built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city to the Cantabrian Sea. A work of contemporary architecture, it has been hailed as a "signal moment in the architectural culture", because it represents "one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united about something", according to architectural critic Paul Goldberger. The museum was the building most frequently named as one of the most important works completed since 1980 in the 2010 World Architecture Survey among architecture experts.

Snake by Richard Serra. Gallery 104.

Did a photo setting to take lots of photos, as you can't record videos here.

Richard Serra (1938-2024)

Snake (1994-97)

Weathering steel, three units, each comprised of two conical sections

Richard Serra has long been acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work, which emphasizes the process of its fabrication, characteristics of materials, and an engagement with viewer and site. In the early 1960s, Serra and the Minimalist artists of his generation turned to unconventional, industrial materials and began to accentuate the physical properties of their work. Relieved of its symbolic role, freed from the traditional pedestal, and introduced into the real space of the viewer, sculpture took on a new relationship to the spectator whose phenomenological experience of an object became crucial to its meaning. Viewers were encouraged to move around—and sometimes on, in, or through—the works, many of which cannot be fully understood without peripatetic examination. Over the years Serra has expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculpture and has focused primarily on large-scale, site-specific works that create a dialogue with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting.

Snake, a work made for the inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, consists of three enormous, serpentine ribbons of hot-rolled steel that are permanently installed in the museum’s “Fish” gallery. Although it weighs around 180 tons, the colossal work is experienced through its negative spaces. The two tilted, snaking passages, capture a rare sense of motion and instability. Snake preceded Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, the artist’s most recent rumination on the physicality of space and the nature of sculpture. Both Snake and the Torqued Ellipses seem to defy gravity
and logic, making solid metal appear as malleable as felt. Shifting in unexpected ways as viewers walk in and around them, these sculptures create surprising experiences of space and balance, and provoke a dizzying sensation of steel and space in motion.

The walk through of the artwork.

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Taken in: Spain / Basque Country / Bilbao (show map)

Taken on: June 26, 2024

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Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Bilbao

Basque

Biscay

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Frank Gehry

Nervion River

Pop Art

Guggenheim Bilbao

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Basque Country

Snake

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Sets appears in: • Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

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