Puppy sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Crossing over the Puente Le Salve with views of 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.

Puppy, 1992 by Jeff Koons.

Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era and the attendant crisis of representation. With his stated artistic intention to “communicate with the masses,” Koons draws from the visual language of advertising, marketing, and the entertainment industry. Testing the limits between popular and elite culture, his sculptural menagerie includes Plexiglas-encased Hoover vacuum cleaners, basketballs suspended in glass aquariums, photographs of himself coupled with his then-wife Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina (former adult-film star and member of Italian parliament), and porcelain homages to Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. In extending the lineage of Dada and Marcel Duchamp, and integrating references to Minimalism and Pop, Koons stages art as a commodity that cannot be placed within the hierarchy of conventional aesthetics.
Koons’s series Easyfun-Ethereal foregrounds happy-face deli sandwiches, spiraling roller-coaster rides, and windswept hair all set against sublime landscapes. The artist combines familiar yet unrelated images to create collagelike paintings rendered with photorealist perfection. These works recall the advertising iconography and billboard-style painting technique present in James Rosenquist’s canvases. Koons’s new brand of Pop painting cleverly engages other art-historical references, in particular Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Sandwiches, for example, is a disjunctive, free-floating fantasy. The collage of animated deli-meats, the turkey made of ice cream, and the cartoon eye and moustache recall the free-associative visual games of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and René Magritte, while the background streams and splashes of milk echo the abstractions of Jackson Pollock. Koons’s fusion of Pop representations with Surrealist and abstract overtones creates a hybrid of fun and fantasy, yielding a body of work that depicts gravity-defying forms of dreamlike pleasure.

In Puppy, Koons engages both past and present, employing sophisticated computer modeling while referencing the 18th-century formal garden. A behemoth West Highland terrier carpeted in bedding plants, Puppy combines the most saccharine of iconography—flowers and puppies—in a monument to the sentimental. Its size—seemingly out-of-control (it is both literally and figuratively still growing) but carefully constructed and tightly contained—can be read as an analogue of contemporary culture. Dignified and stalwart, this work fills us with awe, and even joy, while standing guard at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. In keeping with themes in his past work, Koons has, by combining elite references (topiary and dog breeding) with those of the masses (Chia Pets and Hallmark greeting cards), designed this public sculpture to relentlessly entice, to create optimism, and to instill, in his own words, “confidence and security.

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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

Guggenheim Bilbao

Abando

Basque Country

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao

Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Ingelesen Landako Kaia

Bizkaia

sculpture

Jeff Koons

Stainless steel, soil and flowering plants « less

Sets appears in: • Puente Le Salve, Bilbao • Guggenheim Museum Bilbao more » • Bilbao « less

Groups appears in: • Museum Exteriors

Camera: Canon PowerShot SX70 HS, f/5.0, 1/250 sec, 26.5mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot SX70 HS
Aperture:	f/5.0
Exposure Time:	0.004 sec (1/250)
Focal Length:	26.5mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
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