Al Held at the Guggenheim Bilbao

The Al Held Foundation has donated Noah’s Focus II (1970) to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s permanent collection.

From 7th November 2025, Al Held’s impressive work will be on view on the museum’s third floor, within the gallery Abstraction and Space, which forms part of the exhibition ‘Works from the Guggenheim Bilbao Collection’. The gallery also features iconic works by Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Pablo Palazuelo, Richard Tuttle, Jorge Oteiza, and Eduardo Chillida.

Endeavouring to explore increasingly complex geometry within the image field, Al Held initiated his pioneering series of ‘Black and White’ paintings in 1967 – a decade-long body of work in which he abandoned colour to aggregate more information within the pictorial space. Challenged by the limitations imposed by the planar surface, as well as the strict modernist doctrine of ‘flatness’ advocated by art critic Clement Greenberg, Held developed his own set of protocols, expanding and concretising volume and space through interconnected geometric forms.