KARL LIKES: Egon Schiele at Guggenheim Bilbao
Guggenheim Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra,
2 48001 Bilbao
+34 944 35 90 00
Through January 6th 2013,
Egon Schiele developed a highly personal style through the decorative use of flat surfaces and fluid ornamental lines, a signature of the Viennese Secession. The expressionistic body language and gestures of his figures respond both to the influence of clinical photographs documenting Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s female patients, who suffered from hysteria in the Salpêtrière hospital located in Paris, and to Otto Schmidt’s erotic studio photographs. In his work, Schiele freed the erotic representation of the female nude from the ties to caricature or pornography, and eliminated the historical antagonism between beauty and ugliness, giving the feminine nude a renewed and different role in art. In Schiele’s work, the sick body and pathological disintegration of the self both transcend to the category of art.
Exploring the themes present in his work—landscapes, flowers, children, nudes, portraits, and self-portraits—the exhibition presents a survey of the creative oeuvre of Schiele, a significant figure of early 20th-century art who died prematurely when he was only twenty-eight.