until Sunday February 09 2020

Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
T : +34 94 435 90 90
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48001 Bilbao
Spain

This exhibition presents a retrospective survey of the work of Jesús Rafael Soto (Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, 1923–Paris, 2005). Structured around this artist’s concept of the aesthetic experience in terms of temporality, intensity, and viewer participation, Soto. The Fourth Dimension offers a rare opportunity to re-examine the career of a visionary figure who transformed the art of the second half of the 20th century.

Over a career that stretched for more than five decades, Soto played a fundamental role in the redefinition of the social reach and function of the work of art. Breaking away in the 1950s from the conventional separation of painting and sculpture, his practice moved progressively beyond the visual field to become emblematic of the radical shift undergone by the art object in subsequent years. Transcending the optical research of his early work, he formed part of the first group of kinetic artists in Paris together with Jean Tinguely, Iacov Agam, Victor Vasarely and Julio Le Parc . He also associated himself with experimental groups of international importance, such as Zero or the circle that formed around the Signals gallery in London.

The idea of a “fourth dimension” evokes the unity of space and duration, the visual form and the temporal experience, and is one of the key concepts inherited by the artists of the mid-20th century from the period of quasi-Utopian spirituality of the modernist avant-gardes. Soto believed that artists should employ their own techniques and strategies in a field of investigation shared with science and philosophy.

SOTO. THE FOURTH DIMENSION
From October 18, 2019 till February 9, 2020