Paper played a special role in Eduardo Chillida’s career, inasmuch as the support in which he achieved highly personal results, with a special mention for his prints, which the artist began to explore in 1959. The use of printing techniques, to which he applied the same visual and conceptual principles he exercised in his sculpture, allowed him to instil his works on paper with a profound monumentality thanks to a masterful treatment of the support, recreating the rough quality of granite, the coldness of iron and the transparency and the weightlessness of alabaster.

His first etchings evoke the harmony of his early calligraphic drawings. That said, little by little, these works began to evince a play of volumes reminiscent of his three-dimensional constructions. His experimentation with printing techniques led Chillida to incorporate , which allowed him to recreate on the paper the rough surface of his iron works.

That is the case of Euzkadi VII, a work belonging to the series Euzkadi, made up by six large-format prints. The body of work, published by Maeght Éditeur, Paris, and created between 1975 and 1976, pays graphic tribute to his homeland, to which Chillida felt strongly attached. His return to San Sebastian after his time in Paris led him to a rediscovery of nature and of the force of the Basque Country, a fascination he transformed into abstract works evocative of his surroundings and of the cold light of the Cantabrian Sea. The work, a large dark volume gravitating against an immaculate white background, evinces the ongoing play of opposites that sustains Chillida’s work: black and white, empty and full, light and shadow, and heaviness and weightlessness. Apart from that, the technique used by the artist gives the composition a roughness that recreates the harsh and cold finish of his sculpture, conveying to this print on paper the visual forcefulness and the three-dimensional nature of his work.