The Guggenheim of Bilbao and Google Art & Culture are partnering to promote the arts
Even though the Guggenheim of Bilbao has been around for a while, it keeps innovating thanks to the support of tech giants such as Google.
The exquisite premises have fostered the works of several renowned artists
In the Spanish city of Bilbao, the Guggenheim Museum defies the skyline by virtue of its peculiar architecture. Designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, the building is a piece of art by itself. The museum’s director, Thomas Krens, wanted the premises to stand out, therefore, he asked Gehry to come up with something that would be both daring and innovative.
Since being inaugurated by Juan Carlos I of Spain in 1997, the Guggenheim of Bilbao has housed multiple projects and exhibitions across its irregularly shaped galleries. As one of the biggest art venues of the country, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation-chaperoned museum has witnessed the works of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Serra. And now, after 20 years since its opening, the Guggenheim of Bilbao is offering yet another way to appreciate art. By partnering with Google Arts & Culture — which is the tech giant’s art-focused branch — it intends to make art accessible to more people through the world wide web.
Google Art & Culture is a brilliant initiative
The Google Art & Culture initiative was launched on the 1st January of 2011 in partnership with 17 museums — including the Tate Gallery of London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, and the Uffizi of Florence. The initial goal of the project was to create an online platform where an international community of art lovers could appreciate the works artists that were not geographically accessible to them. The Google Art & Culture online portal features a plethora of high-resolution pictures of paintings and other artworks strewn all across the globe. Since its inception, the initiative has collaborated with about 1500 museums and cultural facilities, including the Guggenheim of Bilbao. The gallery director of the latter, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, has described their work with Google art & Culture as extraordinarily fruitful and very pleasant.” Vidarte even hopes that this “first phase” will unfold into multiple other projects with the tech giant.
An online portal features many pieces accessible to all
A variety of content sourced from the Guggenheim museum is already available in the Guggenheim Bilbao section of the Google Art & Culture website. The online archive is accessible both on desktop and mobile so as to reach the maximum number of people.
Painting Tour
This section of the Google-Guggenheim project allows online audiences to grasp every of the indigo pigments employed by Yves Klein for his “Great Blue Anthropometry” and to appreciate the detailed brushstrokes of Clyfford Still’s gargantuan “Untitled”. This has been made possible by Google’s particularly capable image capture devices.
It is to be noted that the aforementioned works are among the many other paintings that are available online as part of a virtual “Painting Tour” of the Guggenheim.
Movie
The short film “Plegando la gravedad”, realized by urban photographer Trashhand and free runner Johan Tonnoir, showcases the Guggenheim’s epic architecture in a series of gravity-defying acrobatics. The project is also accessible online through Google Art & Culture.
