Oteiza’s early work from the 1930s started out with figurative and expressionist creations. This work, Arantzale, from late 1949, made together with a larger series of works following his return from America in 1948, also shared these same characteristics.

Generally speaking, as is the case of this work, they were ceramic sculptures, which were gradually divested of their features until turning into trans-statues. 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.

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.