This month, the landmark Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens a sprawling new exhibition that's a heady mixture of contemporary and 20th-century art culled from two of Spain’s most important collections. "The Inverted Mirror," on view January 31 to September 2, brings together work from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (or MACBA) and the private la Caixa Foundation; the two entities have recently embarked on a joint institutional initiative, and the Bilbao exhibition marks the first time that portions of their combined collections will be seen together outside Barcelona. Guggenheim curator Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya talked to Surface about the rationale behind this unusually diverse show.

There’s a wide variety of art in “The Inverted Mirror”—from Jeff Wall to Antoni Tàpies to Sigmar Polke. Do you think there’s any one narrative about contemporary art that emerges in the exhibition?
The collections of la Caixa and MACBA couldn’t be more different, but this is what works surprisingly well. There is a chronological timeline in the show, which is not linear and is subverted repeatedly throughout the itinerary of the exhibition. As a result, the visitor can take different paths which encourage slightly different views on the show. History is constructed through multiple voices; we tend to assign different value to each voice and some resonate louder than others, but here it’s more of a choral vision. When you see photographer Manolo Laguillo together with Thomas Struth, or Fina Miralles and Joan Jonas sharing the same gallery, then things fall into place. 

Julian Schnabel, “Against God (Contro Dio)” (1989). Photo: Courtesy Contemporary Art Collection “la Caixa” Foundation

Why name the show after the one particular piece by Michaelangelo Pistoletto, a series of fractured mirrors called “Mirror Architecture”?
At first I was struck by the complementary quality of the collections, but at the same time the image of Pistoletto’s mirror works as a potent and beautiful metaphor for their asymmetry.

Could you talk a little bit about the effect of the work in (and on) the Frank Gehry building the museum occupies? 
This is one of the main considerations when you engage in a curatorial exercise. In the case of Gehry’s building, the architecture and the design of the galleries works in favor of certain type of art—it is certainly not a museum of the small. The monumentality of some galleries has been designed for the type of art that we exhibit in those galleries; these are the spaces where we have Julian Schnabel, Enzo Cucchi, Sigmar Polke, or Ernesto Neto. On the other hand, the “classical galleries,” as we call them in our in-house parlance, adjust well to smaller formats and allow for a different type of interaction, which is more subtle and based on visual memory rather than impact.

Damián Ortega, “False Movement (Stability and Economic Growth)” (1999-2003). Photo: Courtesy of Contemporary Art Collection “la Caixa” Foundation.

But do you ever feel like you’re competing with this extraordinary, very sculptural building that you’re working in?
Such a potent architecture raises many questions for the curators working within this context, the main one being: How do you address the conceptual experience of a visitor after being hit by one of the most iconic architectural images of today? And what is its meaning? Obviously you need to engage the visitor at a different level, in a different type of discussion and experience, which is challenging.

“The Inverted Mirror” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
TItle image: Michaelangelo Pistoletto, “Mirror Architecture” (1990). Photo: Courtesy of the MACBA Collection. Government of Catalonia Art Fund.

Antoní Tapies, “Two Black Crosses” (1973). Photo: Courtesy of Contemporary Art Collection “la Caixa” Foundation.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled (Last Night)” (1993). Photo: Courtesy of MACBA Collection and Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Ernesto Neto, “Globulocell” (2001). Photo: Courtesy of Contemporary Art Collection “la Caixa” Foundation.