EDUARDO CHILLIDA

Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) is a major figure in twentieth century art. During his lifetime he exhibited widely in museums in european cities including the Hayward Gallery, London as well as throughout the USA including at the Guggenheim, New York and the National Gallery, Washington DC. His work is now held in the permanent collections of many major museums such as Tate Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Numerous sculptures commissioned for public places can be seen internationally, such as his monument to German reunification near the Chancellery in Berlin.

Chillida represented Spain in two Venice Biennales where he was awarded the International Grand Prize for Sculpture (1958) and the Kandinsky award (1960). He has received many major international awards for his work, including the the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, Madrid (1981), the Great Prize of the Arts of France (1984), and the Imperial Prize of Japan (1991), whilst in the UK he was elected an honorary Royal Academician, London (1983) and a member of the Academy of Boston and New York, USA (1995). In 1998, he had a major retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid and a comprehensive retrospective at the opening of the Guggenheim, Bilbao in 1999. Kosme de Barañano, the Curator of this Guggenheim show, described Chillida as ‘one of the three pillars of sculpture in the twentieth century' (alongside Constantine Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti).

Chillida sold early pieces of work to Chagall and Braque then in 1956 had his first show with Maeght in Paris; one of France's foremost dealers. He exhibited there alongside Miro, Chagall, Giacometti, Calder, Braque and Léger and many of these artists became friends with whom he exchanged works. His work has inspired writings and catalogue essays by leading philosophers including Martin Heidegger (‘The Art and the Space'1969), Emile Cioran and Gaston Bachelard (who wrote the essay, ‘The Cosmos of Fire', for his first exhibition at Maeght Gallery) as well as poets Jorge Guillen and Octavio Paz. Chillida met Heidegger in 1968 at the Venice biennale and the following year illustrated his ‘Die Kunst Und Der Raum'.

Born in San Sebastián, Northern Spain, in 1924, Eduardo Chillida studied in Madrid before moving to Paris in 1948 to concentrate on sculpture and fine art. There he became friends with the artist Pablo Palazuelo, and his work evolved from a figurative to a new abstract style. His association with Frank Lloyd Wright and Joan Miro strongly influenced him in his use of drawing in space, light and volume.

Chillida returned to San Sebastián in 1950 with his new wife Pilar Belzunce, where they had eight children, and lived until his death in 2002. Chillida was proud of his Basque background and demonstrated his respect for the Basque culture by entitling many of his works in Euskera, the Basque language. He set up the Chillida Leku Museum in the countryside surrounding San Sebastián for the permanent display of his work. He has also left a permanent legacy with works such as the Combs of the Wind (Peines del Viento, 1977) on the shoreline of San Sebastián bay.

Chillida began working in lithography, etchings, silkscreen and woodcuts in 1950, and printmaking represented a significant part of his artistic output thereafter. His graphic works are not mere references to his sculptural work, but artistic expressions in their own right and like his sculpture, they display a preoccupation with form, space and framing. Martin van der Koelen has described Chillida's main preoccupation as “the concept of space and its determinedness by formed matter, the relation between emptiness, volume and their mutual limits”. Absence is therefore as important as presence. The balance of dualities such as black/white, heaviness/lightness and emptiness/fullness give Chillida's work a universal importance: a forum to contemplate our boundaries and freedoms.

In Chillida's early graphic works, the composition was often dominated by unconnected strokes (see Aldati, 1967). During the 1960s he also developed black panes with white internal lines to form compositions. This idea continued well into the 1970s. These black block-like surfaces, with straight lines and perfect angles, gave the appearance of recognizable shapes and helped to infuse the works with a sense of order. Chillida worked mainly with etching, embracing the full materiality of the technique. Instead of the basic rectangular plate, he often cut the etched plate into a shape leaving the shaped plate mark when pressed: the embossment becomes part of the composition. From the 1980s, Chillida used embossing or relief, to give a more pronounced third dimension to his graphic works. This use of embossing became increasingly important until it became one of the most significant features of his etching technique (see the serie of 'Le Poème des Parménides', 1999).

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