Pablo Neruda wrote his poem Oceana at sea, in 1960, aboard the freighter on which he was making the Marseilles-Havana crossing. This exhibition, which takes its title from the Chilean author's book, is a reading of the BBVA Collection, whose common thread is the sea. The verses of Oceana structure the spaces of this exhibition by chapters, and offer a reading of art and history through modernity. Oceana claims the feminine gender of the sea, and covers all the seas, rivers and oceans of the planet.

The sea is the medium through which the Modern Age is generated, the beginning of globalization; with the conquest of America it goes from being an abyss to offering an opening to the new world that invites to be explored. The story does not follow a linear chronological thread; it spans from the 16th century to the present day, with points of inflection between different times and spaces; most of the works come from the BBVA Collection, with external calls to both public and private collections.

The sea is the scene of war in the painting that opens the exhibition: View II of the Naval Battle of Pernambuco (ca. 1632), of Juan de la Corte (1585-1662). The great empires of Spain and Portugal dominate the seas and battle on the Brazilian coasts, between the Dutch fleet and the Spanish-Portuguese fleet, led by Captain Oquendo.

With the rise of navigation, prostheses, sextants, compasses, armillary spheres... proliferated as a complement to the new cartographies, to represent and measure the globe. Michael Mercator performs America sive India Nova (America or New Indies) (ca. 1595 - 1610). As a peculiarity, this map depicts discoveries of the New World era, in which the Atlantic Ocean has become the scope of an unparalleled planetary expansion.

European ports such as Venice, Antwerp, Bilbao and Santander became populous commercial arteries, generating great wealth, including fishing. Biscayan iron and Castilian wool sailed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; from the Bay of Biscay, goods were sent to Flanders and England. The View of the Grand Canal of Venice from Jacopo Frabris (1689-1761). It was common for travelers -especially British travelers of the Grand Tour the traditional trip to Italy in search of the sources of classical culture - were to lead to these vedutas back to their country.

The first sources on fishing in the Basque Country date back to the 16th century. This has been not only a source of wealth, but also a feature of collective identity. Sea wolf (n.d.) is the title of this portrait by Valentín de Zubiaurre (1879-1963). The portrait flees from the anecdote, because the artist's interest lies in capturing the psychological depth of the aitona arrantzale (grandfather fisherman). Zubiaurre was trained in the Dutch tradition, like Carlos de Haes and Muñoz Degrain, both present in the BBVA Collection.

Lothar Baumgarten (1944-2018), a great exponent of conceptual art since the 1960s, is one of the first artists of his generation to realize that the history of Western art cannot be separated from colonialism. Baumgarten has opened new avenues of artistic reflection through a work that questions Western systems of thought and representation, the way they construct our perception and our relationship with other cultures. Since the beginning of his career, he has been interested in the life and modes of organization of indigenous communities in the Amazon. In his work Makunaíma (1972) is self-represented as the mythological Amerindian character born in a tribe on the banks of the Uraricoera River. The artist wears a western trench coat, but with the gesture of the Indian who adopts a garment foreign to his culture. The character appears surrounded by blue pigment, a symbolic space that Lothar Baumgarten identifies with water, as it appears in the photograph of the series Ship lines.

The scene of war in the sixteenth century became in the twentieth century, the scene of work. The Basque Country also owes its industrial wealth, one of the bases of its economy, to the sea. The shipyards are the motif of the canvas of Agustin Ibarrola (1930), Untitled (ca. 1970), who belonged to the collective Estampa Popular whose images, carved in linoleum and wood (coarse materials that do not allow for great detail). During these years, the author sketches the Basque social, rural and industrial landscape with chromatic austerity and the hard black strokes clearly point to an art that declares the collective identity of working-class labor.

José Antonio Sistiaga (1932) is one of the most versatile contemporary Basque artists of his generation. Throughout his career he has passionately undertaken projects of an interdisciplinary nature, with research in the field of experimental cinema, from which he has contributed to the renewal of Basque abstraction in the 20th century, as shown in the painting "The Basque Art". Current Basque landscape (1971).

From the ports of Andalusia, especially Seville, cereals, oil, wine and leather were exported from the 15th century onwards, and quality fabrics, gold from North Africa and oriental products such as silk and spices were imported. In the crown of Aragon, the main mercantile center was the port of Barcelona, a city that traded with the entire Mediterranean. The sculpture Mediterrani (1983) by Susana Solano's iron work evokes this sea and its history, and internalizes the architectural space: his works sometimes adapt to the baseboard, unfold on the floor or hang from the wall. Solano creates symbolic spaces in a process of abstraction inspired by nature. Aurora García states that her work is distinguished from that of other contemporary sculptors by its balance between the visual and tactile dimensions.

Eusebio Sempere (1923-1985), trained at the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia, travels to a boiling Paris, where he coincides with Pablo Palazuelo and Eduardo Chillida, and where he participates in the energy of the European artistic avant-garde. In 1950 he was invited to participate in the V Salón de Otoño, together with Josef Albers and Sonia Delaunay. His sculptural and pictorial work starts from the bases of cubism and constructivism and drifts to kinetic art. The play of lines in his work Untitled (Gray) (1974-1975), sphere, globe and moon transmit, through color and lines, the earth's dynamism and the movement of the night star that governs the tides. He is accompanied in this room by his colleagues Gonzalo Chillida, César Manrique y Fernando Zóbelamong others, gathered in the orbit of the Juana Mordó Gallery in Madrid and the Museo de Arte Abstracto de Cuenca.

From the 19th century, with artists such as Turner, Constable and Monet, among others, the sea became one of the favorite landscapes of pictorial representation. As Rosalind Krauss states, "the sea is a privileged medium for modernism, because of its perfect isolation, its separation from the social, its effect of withdrawal into itself and, above all, its openness to a visual plenitude that is in a certain way elevated and pure, to an unlimited unity that is lost in nothingness, in the non-space of visual deprivation".

The sea is also the scene of one of the phenomena par excellence of modernity: "mass tourism, a spectacular agent of restructuring of the world and of perception". (MST). Beaches and cruise ships become major attractions of the travel industry, as represented in the work Travel (1984) by Dis Berlin (1959), whose painting produced during the eighties in Madrid is indebted to metaphysical painting and pop art.

After his first conceptual works, Alfonso Albacete (1950), he devoted himself to painting at the end of the sixties, where he moved between figuration and abstraction. Two Continents No. 7 - aquamarine (1983) is a reference to the ancient Greek painting of a young man jumping headfirst into the sea: Tomba del Tuffatorein Paestum, Magna Grecia, present-day Sicily. The character seems to be trapped between the layers of oil paint of different colors and dives symbolically into the painting.

Romanticism projects the image of the Monk in front of the sea (1809) with which Caspar David Friedrich offers a sublime scene to the history of art, which breaks with the classical conventions of landscape. His gesture is recovered, reflectively, by Gerhard Richter in Marina (1970). The German artist considers that the condition of possibility of contemporary painting depends on the reworking of the romantic heritage. In the Marinas Richter's work, which he produces from 1960 onwards, carries out a pictorial appropriation of romanticism "mediatized" by photography.

Light floes (2006) by Mireya Masó (1963) is inscribed in the traces of scientific expeditions to Antarctica. Time is Masó's working material on her trip to Antarctica and the movement contained therein comes from both the woman/camera and the observed object. As the artist states, Here in Antarctica every second has the value of the present. It appears and disappears before we can remember it. Since the 2000s, his work in photography and video focuses on natural settings, his landscapes are tamed and function as portraits of a human being who, by the way, is always omitted.

The artist Roni Horn (1955) represents the landscape through photography. His work Still water ("The River Thames, for example") (2000) consists of fifteen photolithographs accompanied by text. Horn conceptually overflows the photograph by incorporating into it the flow of language and a sequence that can be called cinematic. Each image focuses on an area of the surface of the Thames. The footnotes present a series of reflections on the meaning of this river and the moods and narratives evoked by the author.

The impact of tourism and other human activities on nature has led to the current ecological crisis. The climatic emergency is today the main threat to the planet, and the sea is a determining factor in the organization of atmospheric cycles, a carbon sink and the habitat of numerous endangered species. The ecstasy of its contemplation persists in us; however, awareness of its care and that of the environment in general is unavoidable today.

This exhibition shows how much the arts have needed and still need the sea, the natural limit of human endeavors, as a way of knowledge, as a great metaphor for life.