The major exhibition where nature puts the Guggenheim to the test

On view at the Guggenheim Bilbao through 5 March 2026, “Arts of the Earth” appears at first glance like a grand gathering: an intergenerational reunion bringing together more than forty artists who, from the 1960s to today, have worked with earth — understood as nature in its fullest sense — not only as subject matter but as language, inspiration, material, and method. The exhibition is expansive and densely inhabited: each gallery has its own climate, smell, and texture, and the works are not arranged in isolation but in close proximity, as if engaged in conversation around a banquet table. It’s a choice that runs counter to white-cube orthodoxy and immediately clarifies the project’s intent: to create relationships rather than separations.

Manuel Cirauqui

Supported by Iberdrola — Spain’s leading energy group, long committed to ecological transition and landscape stewardship, and a contributor of some of the trees on view — “Arts of the Earth” becomes a kind of full-scale rehearsal for the Guggenheim. The museum, with its spectacular architecture by a star architect and the almost sacral aura with which it hosts the major figures of contemporary art, finds itself here confronted with shifting materials, living organisms, unpredictable humidity levels, smells, and processes that resist full control. Bringing the theme of sustainability into this context means, first of all, changing the way the museum thinks and works. Remaining faithful to this commitment requires treating it not as a simple curatorial motif but as something that enters into real processes, daily decisions, and the constraints one must negotiate. From transport logistics to material selection, from sourcing locally to caring for living works, everything demands rethinking. For an institution accustomed to controlling every parameter, accepting a degree of unpredictability is a small revolution. And it is a shift that runs through every department, as Cirauqui notes: “It involved the entire museum.”

The exhibition opens with several key historical precedents: Jean Dubuffet’s vegetal collages, Joseph Beuys’ herbariums, and Jimmy Lipundja’s bark paintings, rooted in the cosmologies of northern Australia. These works show that the relationship between art and soil is far from new; it resurfaces cyclically throughout the history of contemporary art. In the 1970s, artists such as Ana Lupas, Fina Miralles, and Meg Webster began using perishable materials — straw, soil, sand — already forcing museums to confront works that shift, transform, and decay. Hans Haacke revisited his experiments on plant growth within the exhibition space, while more recently Isa Melsheimer has enclosed living vegetation in small glass greenhouses she describes as “time capsules”: micro-ecosystems gathered outdoors and now capable of sustaining themselves.

Manuel Cirauqui

Memory turns immediately to Arte Povera, the Italian movement born between the late 1960s and early ’70s, which paved the way for a new relationship between materials and artistic gesture and which, within this aesthetic horizon, remains an inevitable point of reference. This is confirmed by the presence in the exhibition of two of its masters, Giuseppe Penone — chosen as the event’s key image — and Giovanni Anselmo. For Arte Povera, perishability was a direct challenge to the museum and its automatisms, a political gesture that unsettled the very role of museum staff. Take, for instance, Giovanni Anselmo’s La scultura che mangia (1967): the work required the museum attendant — the “temple handmaiden,” to borrow an apt image — to replace the lettuce destined to decompose within a few days and to “feed” what was, after all, still a block of stone. And despite their efforts, visitors often encountered it already wilted, precisely because its gradual disappearance completed the meaning of the work. As Cirauqui notes, “whenever there are works with organic or living components that evolve over time, it is always a tremendous challenge for museums.” “Arts of the Earth”, by contrast, engages with the actual behavior of materials: works that require constant care, daily adjustments of light and humidity, in an attempt to recreate within the museum cycles and processes of growth and resilience that belong to the world beyond its walls. A complex form of maintenance that has very little to do with anything “natural.”

The clearest example is Asad Raza’s Root Sequence. Mother Tongue: (2025) twenty-six trees rooted in basins filled with local soil, destined to be replanted after the exhibition. The work stages a real encounter with the vegetal world, yet its presence is sustained by an invisible system of irrigation and monitoring that underscores how life, inside a museum, must be constantly negotiated. The trees do grow, but within a regime of control that raises an unavoidable question: what remains of nature when, in order to be displayed, it depends entirely on the institution? A similar tension runs through Delcy Morelos’s large installation (Witch (Sorgin), 2025): an expanse of dark earth that reconstructs the stratified section of a terrain. The impact is powerfully immersive, thanks also to the strong, enveloping smell of soil, but what we see is still a remade nature — a landscape constructed to simulate the real. The work shows more how the museum can display the ground than the ground itself, making visible the inevitable contradictions between ecology and museography.

Another interesting aspect of this museum operation, directly tied to the ethical and thematic choice of sustainability, concerns the practical consequences it produces in the very way an exhibition is built. Reducing transport means sourcing works and materials within the closest possible geographical radius, and indeed many of the pieces come from practices based in the Basque Country or neighboring regions. Mar de Dios’s ceramics, made from Biscay mud, and David Bestué’s modules, produced with sediments from the Nervión estuary, are just two examples. This shift in priorities generates an intriguing effect: within the temple designed by Frank Gehry — traditionally associated with major international names — historical artists and local practitioners now coexist, young talents alongside established figures, outlining a much broader and more equitable horizon than is typical of global museums.

Manuel Cirauqui

The strength of “Arts of the Earth” lies in showing how the cultural geography of a project shifts when the ethical criteria guiding it shift as well. It is an exhibition-experiment: it offers no answers — and probably could not — but it makes visible the contradictions that accompany every attempt to “do ecology” within a museum, treating sustainability not as a theme but as a set of concrete constraints.

It manages to sustain complexity without imposing a single narrative. It operates on multiple levels — sensorial, material, conceptual — while also raising very practical questions about the role of the museum today: is it possible to speak of ecology without resorting to the simulation of what is spontaneous in nature? To what extent can a museum speak about the world — and to the world — without losing its own identity? And how sustainable can an institution truly be when, by definition, it must control what it brings inside?