Eduardo Chillida

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Eduardo Chillida: Eine Retrospektive, 1993, p. 153, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: The work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Considered one of the leading sculptors of the 20^th century, Eduardo Chillida works with his materials as a poet works with words, his mastery of the object manifesting itself through the profound balancing of the physical with the delicate spaces and pauses in between. The resulting harmony immediately visible in his works, has beautifully shaped the arc of the artist’s internationally lauded career, and is exquisitely evident in the current three lots. Through the careful exploration of the physical and visual properties of paper, terracotta and felt, these works playfully expose the viewer to an intimate continuation of the lyrical brilliance perpetuated through his monumental sculptures. Executed during the late 1980s and 1990s, the simplicity and strength that the artist achieves in the Gravitaciones and Lurraseries are widely recognised as delicate and exemplary renderings of the artist’s core stimulus; the visualisation of space.

Gracefully composed of fragments of paper and felt, both the Gravitacion from 1993 and the Fieltro from 1997 exist within their own spatial plane as sculptural collages, the manipulation of space against the fabrication of angular and geometric three-dimensions and invoke and elegant dialogue with movement and stasis, metrical and the void. In these two works, the artist’s pushes the conversation between the known weight and exertion of gravity and the apparent weightlessness of the Gravitacion and the Fieltro by visibly including the lightest of threads from which the works hang within their frame, succinctly communicating an artistic self-awareness of material limitation.

Composed from the very earth of the sculptor’s native Spain, Chillida’s Lurras initially captivates the viewer through their material presence, however, quickly lead the eye beyond and within, maintaining the integrity of the artist’s investigation of the modulation of space through the mediation of the void. All three lots masterfully exist on the cusp of freedom and restraint, in a moment existing simultaneously in isolation from and in continuation with those objects around them. It is with this exceptional sensibility that Chillida translates and imbues his works of all scale with a monumentality of meaning.