• The exhibition ‘Between the Visible and the Invisible’ starts on April 6 and offers the pieces that have undergone the most significant restorations since 2013.
  • Fundación Iberdrola España collaborates in the annual Restoration Program and has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum since 2001.

The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and Fundación Iberdrola present for the first time an exhibition that brings together the works of the museum’s restoration workshop over the course of more than a decade of collaboration. Iberdrola, through its Foundation in Spain, has been supporting the annual Conservation and Restoration Program of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum since 2001, making possible the treatment of multiple and varied works of art.
The exhibition ‘Between the Visible and the Invisible’, which opens its doors to the public on April 6, demonstrates the success of this collaboration by bringing together a wide range of pieces that have undergone the most significant restorations over the years, with special emphasis on those treated in the 2021 program.

Visitors will be able to contemplate the works in all their splendor and learn about the treatments applied thanks to the documentation that accompanies each piece. The treatments carried out -consolidation of pictorial matter and supports, treatment of surface layers, chromatic reintegration and mounting- have optimized the state of conservation of the works. In addition, the technical analyses – studies of the underlying drawing by infrared reflectography, radiography and ultraviolet light – have yielded valuable information for defining intervention proposals and deepening our knowledge of the works and artists.

In this way, paintings so recognizable from the collection and restored between 2013 and 2021 are now exhibited under a new prism that exposes their material history with the conservation and restoration interventions to which they have been subjected throughout their history and which, on many occasions, are invisible.

In the room itself and behind closed doors, the team of the Conservation and Restoration Department explained the restorations and the discoveries obtained from the technical analyses that have guided the interventions.

The museum’s collection stands out for its chronological extension and the variety of artistic objects it houses, as it is not only limited to paintings, but also to decorative arts.

Iberdrola and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

Iberdrola, since 2001, has been supporting one of the museum’s fundamental missions, which is to conserve its collection of works of art. To this end, since 2013 the Iberdrola-Museum Conservation and Restoration program has been responsible for maintaining the museum’s collection in an optimal state of conservation. To this end, a set of works in need of treatment is selected each year, covering different chronological nuclei and various artistic techniques.