Eduardo Chillida

Previous owner: Museo Chillida Leku, San Sebastián; private collection, Switzerland
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Sotheby’s, London, 2020

Solo exhibition:
2020
‘Buscando la luz’, Museo Chillida Leku, Hernani, Spain
Group exhibition:
2002
‘Crónica de un Centenario’, Museo San Telmo, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain

Eduardo Chillida’s (1924-2002) monumental, site-specific sculptures of steel, stone, and concrete are now famous all over the world, such as the 1976 Peine del viento (Eng. Wind Comb) mounted on three cliffs in his hometown of San Sebastián, or his 1999 steel sculpture Berlin, erected in front of the Federal Chancellery in Berlin.

Chillida cut short his architectural studies at the University of Madrid in 1947 after four years and moved to Paris where he devoted himself instead to drawing and sculpture. Upon returning to his Basque homeland in 1951, he began working with iron: ‘I decided to use iron as a material because I felt that its relative manageability would help me bring my vague idea to life. Stone is compact. The block remains inaccessible, it repels space. And space was the actual material I was interested in; iron was supposed to act simply as an aid, to be the string and the bow that would help my idea resonate.’ [1] From an early stage, he brought together the separate disciplines of architecture and sculpture, enthused by the interplay of space and the outer shell of the artwork.

Chillida once described himself as an ‘architect of emptiness,’ [2], an artist who inhabits the border regions of different genres. His sculptures are about bodies and emptiness in space – about the heaviness of the material and the ‘in-between’ that remains intangible. The space Chillida works on is the space the sculptures create within themselves. The void is not seen as a lack of volume, but rather as a space limited by the mass, partly enclosed or even completely closed.

Eduardo Chillida’s nearly nine-ton work, Buscando la luz III (Eng: In Search of Light), features three elements folded and bent from solid sheets of Corten steel to face each other. The title refers to the central importance of the play of light and shadow that animates the sculptural group. Chillida’s entire body of work revolves around making elements such as space, emptiness, and light tangible. The Basque sculptor created the series Buscando la luz at the end of a decade of artistic exploration. The arrival of the sculpture in the Museum Reinhard Ernst means the city of Wiesbaden has now created an artistic link with its twin city of San Sebastián.

[1] Eduardo Chillida, in: Pierre Volboudt: Chillida, Stuttgart 1967, p. XI, quoted in Thomas W. Gaethgens: ‘Chillida’s Humanistic Concept of Art,’ in: Buscando la luz, ed. by Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Pinakothek der Moderne, [Cologne] 2002, p. 89.
[2] ‘Dessiner c’est donner des entraves, des limites à cet espace naissant. Il faut le penser en termes de volumes. La forme en reçoit sa facture. Elle se dessine toute seule en fonction des nécessités de cet espace qui secrète sa coquille. Comme lui, je suis un architecte du vide.’ Cit. n. Artistes espagnols. Gris, Picasso, Miró, Tàpies, Chillida, ed. by Jean Cassou, exh. cat. Galerie Beyeler, Basel 1969, p. 80.