El Anatsui, Rising Sea, 800 x 1400 cm, aluminium, bottle wrappers & copper
Jessica Hemmings finds that El Anatsui’s monumental textile sculpture holds its own amidst the architectural pride of the Bilbao Guggenheim.
This month, twenty-eight years ago, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened to the public. Today, the Frank Gehry-designed museum located in the Basque region of north-west Spain manages to be celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Cultural investment, particularly of “starchitecture”, imported to reverse the waning fortunes of a city, is now referred to as the “Bilbao effect”, while “McGuggenheim” has also entered parlance—acknowledgement of the cultural imperialism leveraged by outposts of large mainstream museums.
Bilbao was in many ways a prototypical industrial port city in decline when the museum opened. At the time, the Basque separatist terrorism also ran high. Today, only a handful of dockyards remain on the banks of the murky river Nervión. The well-photographed drama of the museum’s architecture is framed by open green spaces and an assiduous city cleaning policy, which seems, at least during my peak summer visit, to send municipal mini-vehicles to wash, sweep, and scrub the tourist zone with zeal.
At the museum’s entrance stands Jeff Koons’ towering sculpture of flowers: Puppy (1992). The work pre-dates the ubiquity of social media, but perhaps more accurately foretold so many museum-goers’ preoccupation with photographing themselves. Less well remembered is that a police officer lost his life working to thwart Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’s (ETA) plans to hide grenades in Koons’ sculpture just days before the museum opened to the public. Inside, Richard Serra’s sculptural curves had become a playground for young visitors. The permanent collection on display is from the Guggenheim and, unsurprisingly, reflects American artists. All these factors gave me greater pause for thought when I reached Gallery 304 at the very top of the museum.
Installed two years ago to celebrate the museum’s 25th anniversary is Rising Sea (2015) by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. On the gallery’s curved wall, the vast work of aluminium bottle wrappers connected with copper wire is one of the artist’s more moderate colour palettes. The predominantly grey field seems to offer a low-tech nod to the Titanium cladding of the museum’s much-photographed exterior. At the time of building, Gehry’s studio pioneered the use of a software programme originally designed for aircraft design to achieve the engineering feat of curving tumbling shapes.
The association is, in fact, a sheer coincidence. Writing in 2020, Ernest Wagner notes that Anatsui’s work was originally made “specifically for a particular wall in a comprehensive solo exhibition of his oeuvre entitled ‘Triumphant Scale’ at the ‘Haus der Kunst’ in Munich”. The exhibition was initiated by the late curator Okwui Enwezor. Wagner explains: “The Nazi regime, a regime without scale, built the Haus der Kunst, a building that broke all scales. El Anatsui’s magnificent, grand scale triumphs over the excessive Nazi scale.”
If Rising Sea was initially an invitation for Anatsui to intervene in the racist histories of the Nazi regime, what does it mean to see the work now crowning the Bilboa Guggenheim? Much has been written about the sheer size of Rising Sea as though scale alone were interesting. To my eye, El Anatsui’s Tate Turbine Hall installation Behind the Red Moon (2023-24) fell foul of chasing this temptation, somehow losing impact and simply feeling large. Here, his work felt far more calibrated.
While Anatsui has become a superstar artist in his own right, the appearance of his work brought a refreshing respite from all the digital screens and moving text on show. I won’t go so far as to say craft was alive and well in the Guggenheim, although it is notable that Faith Ringgold was recently exhibited earlier this year in the original Guggenheim in New York. But materials were speaking with an eloquence and assurance far more interesting than scanning another QR code.
