Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens Riotous Baroque. From Cattelan to Zurbaran

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Riotous Baroque. From Cattelan to Zurbaran an exhibition on view through October 6, 2013.

Featuring contemporary artworks presented alongside 17th-century paintings, Riotous Baroque: From Cattelan to Zurbarán. Tributes to Precarious Vitality attempts to extricate the concept of the baroque from established clichés and traditional perceptions. With a clear shift away from pomp, ornament, and gold, the exhibition focuses on the baroque as a celebration of the precarious vitality that was hailed, rediscovered, lost, projected, and threatened by death. Riotous Baroque does not mark the emergence of a new neo-baroque style. Instead, the exhibition highlights the way in which several contemporary artworks have sought out the rubbing with reality, striving toward direct contact with existential aspects.

Usually associated with dynamism, sensuality, extravagance, and theatricality, withdrawn from the quiet solemnity of classical forms, the baroque also exemplified an age of instability, marking the collapse of an established order. As noted by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, the baroque was founded in “the victory of subjectivism, which aims to express suffering and humor in equal measure.”

The selection of baroque paintings and contemporary works on display constitute an approach to real life that creates a universe of contrasts ruled by the illusionistic, the hyper real, and the longing for an exalted vitality. Avant-garde artists of the 20th century also sought to put art and life on equal terms. Although this essentialist enthusiasm appears to have been forgotten today, its reflection still prevails among artists who probe the permeability of the frontier between art and life.