Eduardo Chillida

Galería Iolas Velasco, Madrid
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1972

Madrid, Galería Iolas Velasco, 20 años de escultura de Chillida, 1972, no. 17
Treigny Yonne, Château de Ratilly, 1974
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Chillida, 1979-80, no. 155, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Close inspection reveals a few very faint, small and minor unobtrusive drop marks to the horizontal plane.
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"The space of Chillda's sculpture is not three dimensional, not the space of volume, but rather the consideration of emptiness, the void, as something dynamic, energizing and above all, a consideration of the materials" (Kosme de Barañano, 'The Last Interview', Exhibition Catalogue, Bilbao, Guggenheim Bilbao, A Homage to Chillida, 2006, p. 112).

 

Exhibiting a dynamic mediation between delicate lightness and the heavy muscularity of metal, Leku II is an exemplary essay of Eduardo Chillida's vanguard twentieth-century sculptural practice. The delicate manipulation of metamorphosed space against the fabrication of angular and geometric three-dimensions invokes an elegant dialogue with movement and stasis, material and the void. Entitled in the artist's native Basque Euskara, Leku which translates as 'Place', concisely summises Chillida's encompassing creative project: the competing duality of space and substance that in turn engenders an encounter and locates a place of unbounded physical and visual experience. Forged in steel during the 1960s, this work was produced contemporaneously alongside a host of colossal public commissions; indeed, the majestic structure of Leku II belies its comparatively small proportions, consummately evincing Chillida's skill for translating and imbuing his work of all scales with the magnificence of monumentality. Executed in 1969, Leku II documents the very deacde Chillida shared the prominent Carnegie Prize for Sculpture with Willem de Kooning, a prestigious accolade that in tandem with the present work testifies to a powerful and authoritative creative maturity.

 

The 1960s marked a period of intense creativity for Chillida; significantly inspired by his itinerant travels, the light and architecture of Greece, Provence, Tuscany, Umbria and Rome ignited a sustained sculptural dialectic with the potential of light and monumental structure. Attendant to the artist's formative architectural training in Madrid during the mid 1940s, Chillida's emphatic inclination for industrial material and colossal three-dimensions readily channelled a dialectic sculptural attitude towards space or air – the real and essential fabric of Chillida's work. As expounded by the artist himself: "Space must be conceived in terms of plastic volume... Form springs spontaneously from the needs of space that builds its dwelling like an animal its shell. Just like this animal I am also an architect of the void" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Chillida 1948-1998, 1999, p. 62).  

 

Within the manipulated jigsaw puzzle of Leku II the dense base block of steel weightlessly proliferates into a delicate levitation of seeming interlocking cuboid shapes; angular, clean lined, sharp, yet in parts moulded and burnished, a dichotomous cubist language of linear forms disseminates a confluence of binary opposites. At once, the interplay of negative and positive space defies the materiality of steel, delivering an uncanny lightness that provokes a dialogue of spatial apertures and enclosures in masterful kinetic tension. Formatively trained in the creation of architectural places, Leku II is a true exercise of Chillida's transgressive power existentially to invoke the phenomenological realm: "Chillida constructs sculpture as topography; as a meeting place of archaeologies, aimed at memory, forcing the viewer to enter into his universe... his work broadens our horizons and is all of nature" (Kosme de Barañano, 'Homage to Eduardo Chillida', Exhibition Catalogue, Bilbao, Guggenheim Bilbao, A Homage to Chillida, 2006, pp. 34-36).

 

Within Chillida's oeuvre, there is an abstract poetic at work that draws a distinct parallel to the compositional phrasing of musical symphony. In 1981 Chillida famously instigated a body of work directly conversant with the orchestration of Bach. However, redolent across the scope of his artistic trajectory, the evocation of sonorous pauses and charged tremulous spacings are conspicuous within the lyrical limits of Chillida's earliest sculptural invention. Deftly essayed in Leku II, where Chillida constructs with spatial emptiness and limit, the metre and rhythm of his sculptural scaffold analogously mirrors the musician as architect of time, sound, and most importantly silence. Kosme de Barañano explains: "Chillida's sculpture has been forming as an oeuvre addressed to silence and engaging the surrounding space. This style is based on simplicity, on the elimination of the rhetorical excesses of the image; what stands out is the modulation of the spaces and the orchestration of the not-said, the energy of the void that acquires the status of sign" (Ibid., p. 58). The interdispersion of harmonic spatial recessions and dissonant openings within Leku II adroitly orchestrates silence and calls forth a charged communion between unbounded space and raw material: as Chillida pointed out, "there is an occult communication between everything near" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute of Art, Chillida, 1979, p. 21).

 

By choosing to forge his ideas on space by directly manipulating the raw, industrial and refractory materiality of iron and steel, Chillida bypassed the traditional preparatory fabric of plaster and marble. Chillida's choice of material, the vivid oxidised iron and burnished steel that now signify something of an artist's trademark, was expedited upon returning from Paris to his native Basque country in 1951. Here, conversant with the local rich heritage of iron mining at the foot of the Pyrenees, Chillida mastered the ancient craft of blacksmithing to forge his life-long engagement with the sculptural manipulation of metalwork, a feat which has since crystallised his reputation as one of the greatest sculptors of the Twentieth Century.

Emanating a quality of lightness unique to his work in steel, Leku II archetypically evinces Chillida's ambient call and response between positive and negative, density and weightlessness, geometry and organicism, to ultimately materialise an intimation of infinite space and sublime nature.