Eduardo Chillida

Tasende Gallery, La Jolla (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1983

Chicago, International Art Exposition, 1983, p. 195, illustrated

Peter Selz and James Johnson Sweeney, Chillida, New York 1986, p. 155, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the lighter brown areas have slightly more red tones in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully capture the three-dimensional nature of the sculpture. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The single vertical element is slightly loose from the base, although stable and sound.
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Forged in monolithic plates of steel, Project for a Monument manifests a sublime moment of aesthetic and spiritual equilibrium in the artist's celebrated career. Elemental and earthbound in form, his work conveys a debt to the Blacksmith tradition of his native Basque country as well as his early studies in architecture in Madrid from 1943 to 1947. Like an architect, Chillida allows the intensity and manner of his material to inspire and mould the forms and spaces of the composition.   In doing so he draws on an abstract language founded upon the material resolution of opposites in which the sculpted forms are shaped by the spaces around them; the strength of Chillida's work is rooted not so much in the form itself but in the relationship of the materials with the void they contain.

 

Project for a Monument is imbued with a monumental quality born of a spiritual radiance and energy that transcends the limitations of size and form. Through the dynamic junction of energy and material that articulates the nature of the void, the present work whispers the dual reality of the universe and echoes the spatial mutations and variations created by the never ending interchange between form and space. Chillida's expression of the mystical nature between physical forms and space becomes a metaphor for the intangibility of our own earthbound experience.  By establishing a relationship between solid form and empty space Chillida articulates the void in the viewers mind as a material entity, breathing life into the dense material of the solid metal and expressing a timeless sense of the infinite which serves as a conduit for memory.  Through its fusion of the material and spiritual realms, Project for a Monument stands as a physical manifestation of Chillida's belief in the metamorphic power of time and space.  The culmination of his quest to evoke the beauty and silence of pure space through the exploring of the mystical relationship between form and void, it secures Chillida's legacy as the sculptor who defined space as a material in art.