Eduardo Chillida: Words and Images

Eduardo Chillida was Basque. He was born in the coastal city of San Sebastián in 1924 and apart from two years in Paris, he worked and lived in and around his hometown until his death in 2002. Chillida was a thinker, a person who engaged with philosophy and was deeply moved by poetry and music; someone who was in tune with the elements. But most of all, he was a sculptor: one who was admired by many other artists. Over a period of more than fifty years Chillida produced an extraordinary body of work in stone, plaster, ceramic, wood, paper and iron, supported by drawing and beautiful graphic work, which helped to establish him as one of Spain's most distinctive and internationally acclaimed artists.

Eduardo Chillida did not intend to be an artist. In 1948, when he abandoned his architecture studies he moved to Paris where he met Brancusi, Picasso and many of the other leading artists of the twentieth century. There he became friends with Alberto Giacometti and Georges Braque. Later he created sculptures in memory of both artists: Table for Giacometti 1988 and Homage to Braque 1990.

He returned to San Sebastián in 1951 where he 'discovered the importance of being Basque'. He said 'here in the Basque country I feel like I am where I belong, like a tree I adapted to its environment, whose arms stretch out to the rest of the world'.

It was in the Basque region that Chillida rediscovered the ancient traditions of the ironmakers and blacksmiths. He made his first iron sculpture in 1951, learning the hard and complicated process from 'an old man who worked in the forge'. Gradually he mastered the art of working with fire and iron, eventually creating seemingly impossible gigantic forms from heated, beaten metal. In 1979 Octavio Paz wrote 'that with this hand the artist moulds, models, caresses, polishes and magnetises the iron until he turns it into a perceptible, animated form'.

As Chillida's artistic career progressed, his interest in architecture informed the development of his sculpture, enabling him to think of the strength and limitation of materials, of structure, and of the organisation of spatial relationships. These factors were important in his later public works, for example Gernika 1988 and the monument at Gijón 1990. The Basque landscape which tumbles down into the sea was the inspiration for many works by Chillida.