Bilbao I
Bilbao II
Bilbao III
Bilbao IV
Bilbao V
Bilbao VI
Homage to Frank Gehry
Architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
Architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain American architect Frank Gehry has created quite a stir with the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with its extravagant design, the overcoming of an extraordinary technical challenge and the building’s happy integration into the urban context of the Basque capital. The magnitude of this daring building cannot help but have an influence on our perceptions of reality and an effect on the power of our imagination.
In this series of six photo-collages, Hans J. Mettler wants to pay tribute to this great architect by combining parts of this construction with creations from nature. But faced with the enormity of this building, the artist responds instead with the subtlety of the miniature.
His work, beyond an artistic sensibility, is triply hybrid. First of all, the heterogeneous structure of the Museum brings to mind both a ship and a wild plant. Next, because of the photographs chosen, there is a juxtaposition of organic and inorganic forms to make the original collages. And finally, to achieve the desired result, the artist uses two different media at the same time to create these works: photography and the computer.
Ottawa, 2002