Regional Renaissance: eight years after the opening of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the art scene in the Basque Country is thriving

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Kim Bradley

Broto, Miguel Angel Campano, Jose Maria Sicilia; artists based in Catalonia (Joan Brossa, Jaume Plensa, Perejaume, Pep Agut, Antoni Abad and Carlos Pazos) and in Andalucia (Pepe Espaliu, Guillermo Perez Villalta, Pedro G. Romero); and, of course, leading and emerging Basque artists, who make up a substantial part of the holdings.

The new, quirky-looking 140,000-square-foot museum (situated near Vitoria's medieval center) is configured as two pale granite buildings separated by a public plaza on the street level, but joined underground. One of the structures is rectangular and has porthole windows (an incongruous maritime touch); the other is box-shaped, with an overhanging roof sliced crosswise in its center by a triangular skylight. Artium's $25.6-million building was financed by the Basque government, the Alava province and Spain's Culture Ministry.

Under the able leadership of Javier Gonzalez de Durana, Artium's fast-paced program opened with strong inaugural exhibitions. Of special note was "Melodrama," guest-curated by Doreet LeVitte Harten, which featured flamboyant, excessive and/or histrionic works by 37 postmodern artists, including Dale Chihuly, Sue de Beer and Laura Parnes, Bryan Crockett, Wim Delvoye and Liza Lou, among others. Subsequent thematic exhibitions have explored current issues of special relevance to the Basque audience, among them, "LaocoOn Devoured: Art and Political Violence" (with work by Leon Golub, Krzysztof Wodiezko, Francesc Tortes, Bill Viola and others) and "Let's All Get Together" (photographs, videos and installations about collective events and the masses by 19 international artists). Rounding out the programming are shows devoted to the collection (four major surveys to date), and solo presentations, including Basque Surrealist Vicente Ameztoy (1946-2001) as well as Perejaume, Joan Fontcuberta, Javier Perez, Jon Mikel Euba, Naia del Castillo and Pello Irazu.

San Sebastian's Art Center

Not to be left behind, San Sebastian, a pretty coastal resort town an hour north of Bilbao by car, is launching an ambitious new art center, the Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporanea (CICC). Like the GMB, the CICC is the headliner for a large-scale urban redevelopment plan intended to revitalize a central area of the city. (14) After several years of determined negotiations, San Sebastian's energetic Socialist mayor, Odon Elorza, recently secured Tabacalera, a superb, light-filled, late 19th-century industrial structure (formerly a tobacco processing plant). According to the mayor, the huge, 344,000-square-foot CICC will serve as the "motor of cultural and social transformation we've been needing." The San Sebastian City Hall, the Guipuzcoa province and the Basque government together have allocated $21.9 million in start-up funds and pledged to pay for the center's renovation and ongoing expenses.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the CICC is the mayor's determination that it become a "factory of visual culture, with an emphasis on new technologies." So far, plans call for the center's scope to approximate Barcelona's popular Center for Contemporary Culture, a bustling multidisciplinary space that plays host to various international festivals of experimental music, video, film and dance as well as thematic exhibitions and conferences related to urban life. (15)