This work is from a series of metaphysical boxes Oteiza made between 1956 and 1958. Ready to be filled with spiritual energy, these spaces condense the artist’s thoughts on the practice of sculpture, which he abandoned in 1959 in the belief that it had arrived at an end.

Oteiza’s obsession was to sculpt the void. That poetics of the void was the result of his reflections on aesthetic values which he addressed in a number of essays later compiled in his book Quousque Tandem…! Ensayo de interpretación estética del alma vasca (1963).

In 1957-1959 he built his Metaphysical Boxes by Conjunction of Two Trihedrons to which this Utsgoikoa (Upper void) from 1958 belongs, permeating them with his personal spirituality.

An admirer of the work of Henry Moore (1898-1986) and of the British sculptor’s study of the void in his “reclining figures,” Oteiza interprets sculpture in a radically new fashion, trying to model emptiness by means of sheets of metal. He went in pursuit of “active nothingness”—a living, breathing space enclosed by orthogonal compositions of iron sheets—that contrasts sharply with his preceding sculptures of large monolithic masses. Starting out from the geometry of Malevich’s square, Oteiza’s metaphysical boxes are the most elementary and refined of its potential combinations.

Oteiza called this new way of understanding sculpture “trans-statue”: a basically spatial and energetic element which he arrived at through a “fusion” of light units that turns matter into energy.