Ibarrola’s Guernica, at the Bellas Artes in Bilbao

Detail of Ibarrola's
Detail of Ibarrola's "Guernica"

The Bilbao museum has recently added to its collection the painting Guernica by Agustín Ibarrola (Bilbao, 1930), a ten metre long by two metre high mural painted around 1977 as a tribute to and reclamation of Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937).

Ibarrola's Guernica
Ibarrola's Guernica

The work was acquired (€300,000) last June at the ARCOmadrid fair through the extraordinary contribution of the Basque Government, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and Bilbao City Council, institutional trustees of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum Foundation.

An emblematic work of Basque art and one of the most ambitious in the painter's production, Ibarrola's Guernica is also one of the most significant episodes in the recent history of the Bilbao museum. It also has the value of a historical document, bearing witness to a socially and politically convulsive period - the Spanish democratic transition - and reflecting the transcendence of Picasso's Guernica, painted forty years earlier, in contemporary art.

Left to right: Miguel Zugaza, Mikel Urizar, Fernando García Sánchez, José Ibarrola, Miriam Alzuri, Irrintzi Ibarrola, Juan Mari Aburto, Rafael Orbegozo, Ramón Castresana, José de la Mano y Leire Jaureguibeitia
Left to right: Miguel Zugaza, Mikel Urizar, Fernando García Sánchez, José Ibarrola, Miriam Alzuri, Irrintzi Ibarrola, Juan Mari Aburto, Rafael Orbegozo, Ramón Castresana, José de la Mano y Leire Jaureguibeitia

The exhibition of Ibarrola's Guernica once again at the museum, thanks to the support of Iberdrola's Artistic Dissemination 2021 Programme, brings one of the most important creations of 20th-century Basque art to the public today. Its connection with the history of the institution provides an opportunity to update knowledge of the work and the artistic and social context in which it was painted thanks to the documentation preserved in its archive and library.

The work had not been shown to the public since the 1980s and, since then, had been stored in the artist's studio in his farmhouse in Oma (Kortezubi, Bizkaia). It was in a good state of conservation, so it only required preventive conservation treatment, which was carried out in the museum's workshop thanks to the Iberdrola-Museo 2021 Conservation and Restoration Programme.

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