I visited the Basque Country last week for an art-and-tapas fest. Unfortunately the tapas side of things falls outside the remit of this blog so I will mainly be discussing the art and architecture that I saw.

The Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz

Vitoria-Gasteiz, despite being the region’s capital, hasn’t had the superstar-architect treatment that Bilbao has. Its major art institution is the Artium, where Antony Gormley’s touring exhibition Between You and Me is currently on show. Aside from the cheese-tastic title, it was a successful demonstration of why Gormley has acquired the reputation that he has. In some places it felt a bit well-rehearsed, like nothing groundbreaking was going on. When he uses his own body as the basis for sculptural works there are interesting results, as in Freefall (2007), where shape of the artist’s body is encased in wire mesh.

Antony Gormley's Freefall, 1997

But the real highlight was the amazing European Field, a whole room filled with crude fist-sized clay figures, a collaborative community project that Gormley has undertaken in several continents. It draws on similar ideas as the current One and Other project on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth: community participation, a desire to create a collaborative portrait of a group of people, a sense of the overwhelming scale of humanity. The longer you look at this crowd of tiny clay figures the more you notice their subtle differences, their expressions, their proportions, the different colours of the clay from which they’re formed. Like the differences in a crowd of people really. This, I think, is where Gormley is at his finest.

Antony Gormley's European Field

The Artium probably only looked slightly second rate because we went there the day after going to Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. As much as it’s been said before, Frank Gehry’s building is an incredible monument to Bilbao. Its ship-like, fish-like, kind-of-surrounding-mountain-like form is covered in shining titanium scales that change colour according to the weather conditions. Inside, each gallery is unique and many operate over several floors, unlike the monotonous white-cube spaces found in other institutions. The spaces were particularly suited to Cai Guo-Quiang’s large-scale sculptural installations and massive ‘gunpowder drawings’ featured in the current retrospective of his work.

A work from Sophie Calle's Last Seen...series, 1991

It would probably be a bit dull for me to ramble on about everything I saw at the Guggenheim. My highlight was a pair of works by Sophie Calle from the 1991 Last Seen… series. A photo of the empty space left by the theft of a Vermeer painting from a American provincial art collection is accompanied by a series of verbal recollections of the work by the staff of the museum. Guards said they could never really see it from where they stood because of the glare of sunlight. A curator described it in detail, down to the paintings Vermeer had depicted in the work’s background. Others challenged typical interpretations of the work with very personal responses. It’s the sort of work that must appeal particularly to curators and those in the museum world, but it is also strikingly honest about the different ways we see paintings.

Calatrava's Zubizuri Bridge, Bilbao

Outside the Guggenheim, bold architectural statements continue across Bilbao, from the Norman Foster-designed Metro system to Calatrava’s ‘Zubizuri’ Bridge and amazing bird-like airport. The latter building deserves a special accolade for making a two-hour Easyjet delay a relatively painless experience: we managed to find a picnic spot in the departure lounge that allowed 270-degree panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. It’s a bit of a step up from the closed-in, windowless holes at Gatwick. It might all be stunt architecture designed to lure in plane-loads of cultural tourists, but it’s worked on me: it has given Bilbao an amazing vibe that should put it on everyone’s must-visit list.

Lauren Barnes

www.artium.org
www.guggenheim-bilbao.es