Eduardo Chillida

About the artist

Eduardo Chillida Juantegui was born in San Sebastián on 10 January 1924. He kept goal for Real Sociedad until a knee injury ended his football career, studied architecture in Madrid from 1943 to 1946, and in 1947 gave it up for art, moving to Paris the following year to work in plaster and clay (Wikipedia). His early work shows the influence of archaic Greek sculpture and Henry Moore; after settling in Hernani he began working in iron and made his first abstract iron sculpture, Illarik (Fundación MAPFRE).

He forged iron with the help of a local blacksmith, used wood in the Anvil of Dreams series from 1954 to 1966, and took up alabaster in 1965. From 1959 he also made etchings, lithographs and woodcuts (Wikipedia). He worked in concrete with the engineer José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez and in ceramic with Joan Artigas (Fundación MAPFRE). His public works include The Comb of the Wind on the rocks of La Concha bay in San Sebastián, De Musica in Dallas and Topos V, shown in Barcelona's Plaça del Rei since 1986 (Wikipedia).

Chillida showed at the Venice Biennale in 1958, 1988 and 1990 and at Documenta II, IV and VI, received the Carnegie Prize for sculpture at the Pittsburgh International in 1964, and had retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1980 and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1999. His honours include the Wolf Prize in Sculpture (1985) and the Praemium Imperiale (1991). He died near San Sebastián on 19 August 2002 (Wikipedia). Tate holds his Modulation of Space I (1963) (Tate), and the Chillida Leku museum in Hernani, created in 2000 and relaunched in 2019, keeps his legacy (Fundación MAPFRE).

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Eduardo Chillida
2. Tate: Eduardo Chillida
3. Fundación MAPFRE: Eduardo Chillida