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Am I back in New York? Not quite. The other (or one of the other) Guggenheim museums is located in Bilbao, Spain for some reason. And I went there. And it was SWEET!

This was a beautiful series of wet-clay sculptures being created in the museum by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The figures are based on characters in a famous Maoist propaganda portrait. Since he’s building them out of clay and not cooking it, the figures begin to dry over time so the older ones are all cracked and broken. I would’ve filmed more but at that point a museum staff member told me that filming wasn’t allowed and tried to confiscate my camera, fortunately I talked her into letting me put it back in my bag instead.

My favorite exhibition at the museum was by an amazing Japanese post-pop artist named Murakami. His stuff is cartoonish, silly, creepy and profound at the same time. Check it out:

Finally, there was a huge hall of Richard Serra sculptures. Previous to this visit I’d rather disliked Serra because of his tendency to drop a big ugly piece of curved, rusted steel in the middle of otherwise beautiful parks and squares.

But the ones in Bilbao are in their own space, and are more intricate. They are spiral and nautilus shapes, or other odd corridors that you can walk through. The sensation of moving through a hallway of sorts where the angles of the walls continually, gradually change is an amazing thing to experience. I tried to capture it using the flip vid, but it doesn’t have a wide angle enough lens so didn’t really capture the feel of it.

So I’m really happy I decided to drive an hour east to Bilbao to check this thing out.