Eduardo Chillida
Basque sculptor of forged iron and carved stone, working on the space rather than the mass.
Eduardo Chillida was born in San Sebastian in 1924 and kept goal for Real Sociedad before a knee injury ended it and architecture, then sculpture, took over. He worked with a village blacksmith on his return from Paris in 1951 and forged iron became the central material, joined later by steel, granite, alabaster and fired clay. The recurring subject is not the mass but what the mass encloses: arms of metal reaching around a void, the comb forms of the Peine del Viento anchored into the rocks at San Sebastian, the great excavated chamber inside Tindaya. He also made a very large body of works on paper. He died in 2002.
The forged and cast works exist both as unique pieces and as numbered editions, and the two are not distinguishable without the documentation, which makes establishing which you have the first step rather than a formality. Surface is the other issue: the iron and steel are meant to oxidise in a controlled way, and cleaning or lacquering a patina is not reversible. The gravitaciones — cut and layered paper suspended in space — and the etchings and lithographs are numerous. Museo Chillida Leku holds the archive.
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