One of the most important actions in the 2024 campaign of the Iberdrola-Museum Conservation and Restoration Programme—the first was Berruguete’s The annunciation, unveiled on 21 May—was the conservation treatment applied to eighteen of the 27 paintings comprising the mural Euskadi (1977–1979) by Agustín Ibarrola (Bilbao, 1930–Galdakao, Bizkaia, 2023), recently loaned to the museum for a ten-year period (commodatum) by the artist’s children.

This treatment allowed for not only the material recovery of this iconic work of contemporary Basque art but also the documentary reconstruction of the original installation that Ibarrola created in 1979 for the museum’s former Grey Room. These eighteen works, now held on deposit at the museum, are displayed following restoration along with six additional paintings that the artist included in the original installation in the Grey Room: four from Ibarrola’s Guernica (c.1977), acquired by the museum in 2021, and two others donated by the painter that same year. The remaining three paintings that would complete the original set of 27 are still missing.

The conservation and restoration treatment was coordinated by Jon Apodaca, a Conservation and Restoration specialist, while Miriam Alzuri, the Modern and Contemporary Art Curator, was in charge of reconstructing the documents.

The photographer Patxi Cobo was also enlisted to restore the images of the installation—whose original photographs have not survived—published in the brochures of two exhibitions that Ibarrola held in Barakaldo and Sestao in 1980.

Finally, the sculptor Txomin Badiola also participated with the text titled Euskadi. An installation of Ibarrola at the limit, which is included in Notebook 6, a booklet issued by the museum for the occasion, accompanied by a host of illustrations and images of the original installation at the museum in 1979.