Eduardo CHILLIDA (1924-2002)

Eduardo Chillida

(Eduardo Chillida Juantegui; San Sebastián, 1924 - 2002) Spanish Sculptor, considered one of the most important of the TWENTIETH century. Born in the bosom of a traditional family and strong catholic beliefs, was the third child of Pedro Chillida, a soldier, who would reach the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and Carmen Juantegui, a housewife fond of singing that compatibilizaba their chores with the practice of choral concerts in the heart of the Orfeón Donostiarra.

Eduardo Chillida

Eduardo Chillida conducted studies of primary and secondary education in the College of the Marist brothers of his native city, and in 1943 he moved to Madrid to begin the career of architecture. But never would such studies (in 1947 he left school to devote himself exclusively to drawing and sculpture), some of the precepts there taught, such as the relationship between volumes and space, would, in the end, a decisive importance in the ideation conceptual of his later work in sculpture. Also, in those years, Chillida acquired a good reputation as a soccer goalkeeper, even to be the holder of the Royal Society.

First creative explorations

In 1948, looking for a creative environment more conducive to that I lived in franco's Spain, moved to Paris. There, in addition to knowing first-hand the work of artists such as Picasso, Julio González or Brancusi, he felt a special fascination for the archaic sculpture Greek of the Louvre. In this first and short-lived stage is carried out in plaster and terra-cotta a series of sculptures, still influenced by the figurative tradition. All in all, those polls artistic not satisfied to Chillida.

Exhausted and frustrated, decided to leave the French capital to return to their homeland. After a time, recalling those years, I would say: "I realized that Paris as well as my frequent visits to the Louvre took me into the white light of Greece, in the Mediterranean. I understood that that was not my place and I told Pili: “let's go Back home, I'm finished”. Upon arriving, I understood why I felt I was finished, my country has a black light, the Atlantic is dark".

In 1951, he settled in the Basque Country with his wife, Pilar Belzunce, who had married a year before. In the local basque of Hernani, he began to work in the forge of Manuel Illarramendi, who taught him the secular secrets of the art of the forge.

That same year, Chillida gave birth to their first abstract sculpture, Ilarik: an austere and "primitive" trail in the the iron and wood materials with strong connotations of mythical within the tradition and the culture basque) were part of giving the lie to the old hierarchy between "statue" and "base". This work was a before and an after in his artistic career, not only by the choice of the materials mentioned above, but, above all, because she is settled, even though still incipient, concepts constitutive of his later work like space, matter, vacuum, or scale.

Anvil X dream (1962)

Creative explorations initiated with Ilarik would be redefined and realized in the following years, with pieces such as in Praise of the air, the Music silent, the Rumour of the limits or The comb of the wind. This latter work (one of the most well-known of the artist) was working, in its various versions, for more than fifteen years and not completed until 1977, when the three steel parts of the installation were definitely connected in front of the sea, atavistic and dark, that had seen the birth.

International recognition came also in the fifties by exposing in galleries and museums in cities such as Paris, London, Milan, Madrid, New York or Chicago, among others, and participate in contests as important as the Venice Biennale of 1958, in which he won the International Grand Prize of Sculpture, or the Kassel Documenta of 1959.

Materials and media new

At the end of the decade he began to experiment with new materials and media. In 1959 performed Abesti Gogora, his first sculpture in wood. That same year, he also executed his first work in steel, Rumor of limits IV, and his first etchings. In 1963, along with the historian and art critic Jacques Dupin, travelled to Greece. Again entered in contact with the world and the aegean culture, but on this occasion (without the mediation, perhaps, of the enlarged rooms of the Louvre) the blinding light and, for him, distant from the Mediterranean, is revealed with new splendors.

The combs of the wind

Of the journey by land to the Greek would be born, two years later, their first alabasters, as the series in Praise of the light. Using the technique of casting, the same as that already employed the greatest sculptors of classical Greece and the Renaissance, Chillida pierced and shaped block for the space and the light to enter in your stony bowels. This conception of promethean's done sculpture, brought, yes, to a scale of titanic, would be one that would brighten your unfinished project to the mountain of Tindaya, on Fuerteventura.

In 1971 he made his first work in concrete. In subsequent years, coinciding with large commissions for public sculpture, this material would be used in a large number of works, such as Place of meetings III (Madrid, 1971), The house of Goethe (Frankfurt, 1986), in Praise of the water (Barcelona, 1987), in Praise of the horizon (Gijón, 1990), or Monument to the tolerance (Seville, 1992).

Berlin, of Eduardo Chillida

In addition, we also used the steel (one of the materials in which he worked more to taste) in the realization of many of his sculptures of the eighties and nineties, such as the Monument to the Fueros (Vitoria, 1980), Homage to Jorge Guillén (Valladolid, 1982), Helsinki (Helsinki, 1991), a Tribute to Rodríguez Sahagún (Madrid, 1993), Cage of freedom (Trier, 1997), Dialogue-Tolerance (Münster, 1997) or Berlin (with this work, situated in front of the new Chancellery in the German capital, and was inaugurated posthumously in 2002, Chillida wanted to symbolize the goodwill of the new unified Germany).

In the year 1999, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao -by expanding the sample, which a year before had been offered by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS)- celebrated the 75th anniversary of the sculptor with an interesting retrospective in which they were presented over two hundred works. This exhibition has been, up to now, the most important thing that you have been dedicated to the artist.

In September 2000, Chillida saw had one of their big dreams. That day, in Hernani, opened its doors on the center that he himself had baptized as Chillida-Leku (Chillida). This project began to take shape in 1984, when he and his wife purchased an old farmhouse of the XVI century, surrounded by meadows and forests, with the idea of creating a space to contribute to the dissemination of his work and housed permanently a representative sample of the same. The Museum Chillida-Leku was not only the last legacy of this universal artist who, without forgetting his roots he knew how to reinvent the sculpture to fill it with new meanings, but that in a short time has become one of the new cultural referents of the Basque Country.

A legacy essential

Since it would be known on the international scene back in the fifties, the work of eduardo Chillida has been represented in major museums and art collections of Europe and the united States. In addition, his works have been commented and analyzed by historians and critics of art, such as by poets of the stature of Octavio Paz, Gabriel Celaya, José Ángel Valente, amongst others, and philosophers as important as Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard. Award-winning, on countless occasions, and exposed in numerous museums and retrospectives, his work is a legacy of inescapable reference in the contemporary art scene. For many it was the best Spanish sculptor of the second half of the TWENTIETH century.

Throughout its more than fifty years of creative career, Chillida explored concepts (opposites to some, complementary to him) as the vacuum and volume, light and shadow, limit and infinity. The material of which were made for their work (even searching on components as diverse as iron, stone, alabaster, steel or concrete) was not for him an end in itself, nor were such forms of austere and arcane as defining of his work. Beyond matter and form, what I wanted to express Chillida through his works was a ethical, mystical, and transcendental existence.