Browsing Chillida

Found photos, from a magazine-browsing session months ago. An article on Eduardo Chillida, no idea what magazine it was in. Events overtook me and I never did look closely at the images, until now.

His ironwork, made early in his career, is new to me. The text on that page, cropped from the photo, read:

"In Silent Music (1955) and In Praise of Air (1956) Chillida has fully mastered the material and is able to articulate it according to his wishes:

A piece of iron is an idea in itself, a powerful and unyielding object. I must gain complete mastery over it, and force it to take on the tension which I feel within myself, evolving a theme from dynamism. Sometimes the iron refuses o give in. But when I eventually reach my goal I always know; the individual fragments crystallize with a sudden shock and form a whole. Nothing can no separate the space from the force which encircles it."

Stone sculpture:

Alabaster

Clay?

 From his "Homage to Goethe" series:

When you google Homage to Goethe, most of the images are from pinterest -

Here's an interview from the late 90s, mostly about his public art, in which he says that on his return from "Europe" to the Basque country:

" In the studio every day, I was looking back to the things I had been doing for the last year, and then I stopped to ask myself, "Why?" This was a crucial moment for me. At that moment, I decided never to look back. "

A question and an answer:

Wagner: Issues surrounding your work involve interior and exterior, solid and void, time and space, weight and weightlessness. Do you think you are continually solving these problems?

Chillida: The sculptures are very large and my work is a rebellion against gravity. A dialectic exists between the empty and full space and it is almost impossible for this dialogue to exist if the positive and material space is not filled, because I have the feeling that the relation between the full and empty space is produced by the communication between these two spaces. You can't simulate volume.

And this, about Chillida's homage pieces:

Wagner: You have often dedicated works to these people: Bachelard, Pablo Neruda, as well as artists Alexander Calder and Joan Miró. How were your homage sculptures conceived?

Chillida: I discover connections, even without thinking of people. I am concerned with them because I admire them in the history of thought. Miró was a fantastic person, his work inspires an unusual feeling. Everyone has always noticed him because of color, but I look at the drawings of Miró. The drawings are very important, all the curved lines were always convex, never concave. This was an important problem: I drew concave lines and his were convex. A concave line encloses a space, but it must be accessible or it is dead. He changed my way of looking at line and space, so I wanted to do an homage to him, "Homage to Miró" (1985).

A recent art market view of Chillida's work is here; the first of the Homage to Goethe series sold for $2,8m.