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Eduardo Chillida Biography

Eduardo Chillida

(Eduardo Chillida Juantegui; San Sebastián, 1924-2002) Spanish sculptor, considered one of the most important of the 20th century.Born into a traditional family with strong Catholic convictions, he was the third son of Pedro Chillida, a military man who would reach the rank of lieutenant colonel, and Carmen Juantegui, a housewife fond of singing who reconciled his domestic chores with practice of choral concerts within the Orfeón Donostiarra.

Eduardo Chillida

Eduardo Chillida studied primary and secondary school at the Colegio de los Maristas de his hometown and in 1943 he moved to Madrid to begin his career in architecture.Although he would never finish these studies (in 1947 he left the faculty to dedicate himself exclusively to drawing and sculpture), some of the precepts learned there, such as the relationship between volumes and space, would ultimately have a decisive importance in conceptual ideation.of his later sculptural works.Likewise, in those years, Chillida acquired a good reputation as a soccer goalkeeper, even becoming the owner of Real Sociedad.

First creative explorations

In 1948, looking for a creative environment more conducive to the one lived in Franco's Spain, he moved to Paris.There he became friends with the painter Pablo Palazuelo and, in addition to knowing first-hand the work of artists such as Picasso, Julio González or Constantin Brancusi, he felt a special fascination for the archaic Greek sculpture of the Louvre.In that first and ephemeral stage, he made a series of sculptures in plaster and terracotta that were still influenced by the figurative tradition.Still, those artistic probes did not satisfy Chillida.

Exhausted and frustrated, he decided to leave the French capital to return to his homeland.Later, recalling those years, he would say: «I realized that Paris, as well as my frequent visits to the Louvre, were taking me towards the white light of Greece, of the Mediterranean.I realized that this was not my place and I said to Pili: "Let's go home, I'm finished." When I arrived I understood why I felt finished: my country has a black light, the Atlantic is dark ».

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

That same year, Chillida created his first abstract sculpture, Ilarik : an austere and "primitive" stele in which iron and wood (materials with strong mythical connotations within Basque tradition and culture) were integrated, denying the old hierarchy between "statue" and "pedestal".This work represented a before and after in his artistic career, not only due to the choice of the materials mentioned, but, above all, because it was based, although still incipient, constitutive concepts of his later work such as space, matter, emptiness or scale.

Dream Anvil X (1962)

Creative explorations started with Ilarik would be redefined and specified in the following years with pieces such as Elogio del aire , Silent music , Rumor of limits or The comb of the wind .He was working on this last work (one of the best known by the artist), in its different versions, for more than fifteen years and did not complete it until 1977, when the three steel pieces of the installation were definitely set in front of that sea, atavistic and dark, who had seen him born.

International recognition also came to him in the fifties when he exhibited in galleries and museums in cities such as Paris, London, Milan, Madrid, New York or Chicago, among others, and participated in such important competitions as the Venice Biennale in 1958, in which he won the Grand International Sculpture Prize, or the Documenta de Kassel in 1959.

New materials and supports

At the end of the decade he began to experiment with new materials and supports.In 1959 he made Abesti Gogora , his first wooden sculpture.That same year, he also executed his first work in steel, Rumor of limits IV , and his first etchings.In 1963, together with the historian and art critic Jacques Dupin, he traveled to Greece.Again he came into contact with the world and Aegean culture, but this time (without the mediation, perhaps, of the pompous halls of the Louvre) the blinding light and, for him, distant from the Mediterranean, it revealed itself to him with new splendors.

The combs of the wind

From that journey through the land, the Greeks were born, two years later, their first alabasters, such as those in the series Elogio of light .Using the casting technique, the same one already used by the great sculptors of classical Greece and the Renaissance, Chillida drilled and shaped the block so that space and light would enter its stony entrails.This Promethean conception of the sculptural fact, taken, yes, on a titanic scale, would be the one that would illuminate his unfinished project for the mountain of Tindaya, in Fuerteventura.

In 1971 he did his first job in concrete.In subsequent years, coinciding with the great commissions of public sculpture, this material would be used in a large number of works, such as Meeting Place III (Madrid, 1971), Goethe's House (Frankfurt, 1986), Praise of water (Barcelona, ​​1987), Praise of the horizon (Gijón, 1990) or Monument to tolerance (Seville, 1992).

Berlin , by Eduardo Chillida

Likewise, he also used steel (one of the materials in which he worked more at ease) in the realization of many of his sculptures from the eighties and nineties, such as the Monumento a los Fueros (Vitoria, 1980), Homenaje a Jorge Guillén (Valladolid , 1982), Helsinki (Helsinki, 1991), Homage to Rodríguez Sahagún (Madrid, 1993), Cage of freedom (Trier, 1997 ), Dialogue-Tolerance (Münster, 1997) or Berlin (with this work, located in front of the new Chancellery of the German capital and inaugurated posthumously in 2002, Chillida wanted to symbolize the conciliatory spirit of the new unified Germany).

In 1999, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao-expanding the sample that a year earlier had offered the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS)-held the 75th anniversary of the sculptor with an interesting retrospective in which more than two hundred were presented s works.This exhibition has been, so far, the most important that has been dedicated to the artist.

In September 2000, Chillida saw one of his great dreams come true.That day, in Hernani, the center that he himself had baptized as Chillida-Leku (House of Chillida) opened its doors.This project began to take shape in 1984, when he and his wife acquired an old 16th century farmhouse, surrounded by meadows and forests, with the idea of ​​creating a space that would contribute to the dissemination of their work and permanently house a representative sample Of the same.The Chillida-Leku Museum was not only the last legacy of this universal artist who, without forgetting his roots, knew how to reinvent sculpture to fill it with new meanings, but in a short time it has become one of the new cultural references of the Basque Country.

An essential legacy

Since he became known on the international scene back in the fifties, Chillida's work has been represented in major museums and art collections from Europe and the United States.Likewise, his works have been commented on and analyzed both by art historians and critics and by poets of the stature of Octavio Paz, Gabriel Celaya and José Ángel Valente, among others, and such important philosophers as Martin Heidegger or Gaston Bachelard.Awarded countless times and exhibited in numerous museums and retrospectives, his work constitutes an inescapable legacy of reference in the contemporary art scene.For many, he was the best Spanish sculptor of the second half of the 20th century.

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

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