20th Century Spanish

Eduardo Chillida was born on 10 January 1924 in San Sebastian. He grew up in a family with great artistic sensitivity, something that marked his interest in painting and sculpture. Before embracing art, he made a name for himself as goalkeeper for the Real Sociedad football team. However, a serious knee injury soon ended his promising career. Chillida began his academic training in the field of Architecture, a discipline he abandoned in 1947 to develop his practice as an artist. One year later he moved to Paris, where he made contact with key figures of the European avant-garde and Spanish abstraction, with a special mention for Pablo Palazuelo (1915-2007) with whom he exhibited at the 1949 May Salon. In that period, he was a frequent visitor of the Louvre, where he was fascinated by ancient Greek sculpture. This discovery led him to the creation of a number of plaster pieces, based on the works of Phidias and his predecessors.

In the early 1950s the artist returned to the Basque Country. He settled in Hernani, where he began to work at the forge of José Cruz Iturbe, creating his earliest works in iron, a material closely related to Basque tradition and culture. From this moment on, iron would become the core material of Chillida’s practice and it would remain so for the rest of his career. In 1958 he exhibited at the 29th Venice Biennale together with other major Spanish artists. He was awarded the Biennale’s Grand International Sculpture Award, a distinction that consolidated his worldwide prestige. In those years he explored the visual potential of paper with an interesting body of engraving works which he would instil with the same material quality as his three-dimensional works.

A journey through Greece, Italy and Provence in 1963 introduced him to the light of architecture, opening up his creative universe to a new dimension. It was then when he incorporated alabaster to his practice and began to explore the effects of light on this translucent mineral. The output was a highly serene body of work.

Starting from a concept of sculpture that plays with space, light and the material, Chillida created a large number of monumental works for the public realm. Good examples are El peine de los vientos (The Comb of the Wind, 1977) in San Sebastian, Homenaje a los Fueros (Homage to the Fueros,1981) in Vitoria, and Elogio del horizonte (In Praise of the Horizon,1990) in Gijon. In the 1980s he created a significant suite of sculpture reliefs on paper known as Gravitaciones (Gravitations).

Widely recognised in Spain and abroad, works by Chillida are often exhibited in major solo and group shows. Particularly significant among them was the retrospective show simply called Chillida held in 2003 at Fundació Miró in Barcelona.

Throughout his career Chillida garnered many important distinctions: in 1981 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, in 1987 with the Prince of Asturias Award and six years later the Imperial Order of Japan. In 1994 Chillida was appointed a member of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Eduardo Chillida died on 19 August 2002, leaving behind a major legacy that acknowledges the spirit of renewal in twentieth-century sculpture.