Steve McQueen: 66-76-26

Curator: Lekha Hileman
Sponsor: Occident

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.