BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present 66–76–26, a major new installation by Steve MᶜQueen. Conceived specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the work brings together two iconic recordings of “Wild is the Wind” — Nina Simone’s 1966 interpretation of Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s song and David Bowie’s 1976 cover — stripped of their instrumentation and presented a cappella, with each voice spatially separated within a darkened gallery. Two performances, ten years apart, heard anew. This exhibition is sponsored by Occident insurance company.

For more than three decades, “Wild is the Wind” has remained present in MᶜQueen’s work. First encountering Bowie’s recording in the mid-1990s and later discovering Simone’s version, the artist found himself repeatedly returning to the song, drawn by its emotional complexity and its capacity to reveal new meanings over time. As MᶜQueen has observed, the song never settles into a single interpretation. Part love song, part lament, part declaration of longing, it continues to provoke.

In 66–76–26, MᶜQueen strips the recordings back to their most essential element: the human voice. Simone’s voice emerges from one side of the space while Bowie’s answers from the other, and as visitors move through the gallery the two voices unfold in dialogue across the architecture. What emerges is neither a comparison nor a reconciliation, but a newly created work in which two distinct artistic voices resonate across time and space.

The title refers to the years in which Simone and Bowie respectively recorded the song, as well as to the year of the exhibition itself. By bringing together performances separated by a decade and presenting them fifty and sixty years later, MᶜQueen creates an encounter that collapses historical distance. The work invites reflection not only on the song’s enduring power but also on the social and political conditions through which these recordings have travelled. Created during periods marked by upheaval, uncertainty, and transformation — the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate — the performances speak with particular force to the present moment.

Recent works including Bass (2024), Atlas (2026), and Untitled (2025) have seen MᶜQueen move increasingly toward sound, light, and perception as primary materials. Rather than constructing narratives through moving images, these works explore how immaterial phenomena can shape bodily experience and collective attention. 66–76–26 continues this trajectory, expanding MᶜQueen’s investigation of how artworks might operate beyond the frame.

The installation transforms the gallery into a sparse, dimly lit environment calibrated to heighten acoustic awareness. Deprived of visual distraction other than the source of the sound, visitors become acutely conscious of sound, silence, breath, and duration. As MᶜQueen has described, the work draws on an understanding of silence as active material — an idea he associates with Miles Davis’s interest in the spaces between notes, where meaning emerges not only from what is present, but from what is withheld. That principle informs the structure of 66–76–26, where pauses, breaths, anticipation, and intervals become as significant as the voices themselves.

This reduction is not an exercise in minimalism but an attempt to arrive at essentials. MᶜQueen has spoken of wanting to strip away the noise and focusing on fundamentals — to ask what remains when everything extraneous is cleared away, and whether what is left will hold. At the center of that question, in this work, are two voices intertwining and the intensity they carry. “Love is the only thing worth living for and worth dying for,” MᶜQueen has said of the longing he hears in both performances. “Within everything that was going on in the world, it just comes down to that. It’s the only thing.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by acclaimed Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom. Conceived as an extension of the installation rather than its documentation, the publication brings together archival and photographic material related to Nina Simone and David Bowie, alongside newly commissioned texts. These include a conversation between MᶜQueen and curator Lekha Hileman ranging across the making of the work, the enduring pull of the song, and the longer arc of a practice that has always tested the boundaries of what art can ask of its viewer, as well as a newly commissioned essay by art historian and artist Cora Gilroy-Ware exploring the cultural and artistic legacies of Simone and Bowie. The catalogue proposes a dialogue between image and sound, presence and absence, intimacy and performance — and considers how two singular artists continue to resonate across generations.

In parallel with the exhibition, the Museum will present a film program dedicated to MᶜQueen’s cinematic work, offering audiences an opportunity to consider the relationship between his work in cinema and the gallery. While MᶜQueen’s films have earned international acclaim — among them the Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave — 66–76–26 foregrounds the concerns that have long animated his artistic practice: perception, embodiment, memory, duration, and the capacity of art to create spaces for reflection and encounter.