Eduardo Chillida

EDUARDO CHILLIDA JUANTEGUI (San Sebastian, 1924 - 2002).
Untitled.
Pencil on paper.
Signed in the lower right corner.
It presents very slight stains.
Measurements: 21 x 27 cm; 34,5 x 41 cm (frame).

This work is highly representative of Eduardo Chillida's most intimate and exploratory facet. Although the general public recognizes him mainly for his monumental iron sculptures, drawing was for him a fundamental language, almost a daily discipline of thought.

The work stands out for its extreme minimalism. Chillida uses a continuous, fluid pencil line to define volume. The human figure is reduced to its geometric and organic essence. Here we can appreciate the artist's obsession with the limit: where the form ends and the surrounding space begins.

The economy of means concentrates attention on the relationship between emptiness and volume, one of the fundamental axes of his work. Far from the descriptive, the drawing functions as a place of reflection, where form is born from gesture and space becomes active matter.

Throughout his life, Chillida received numerous prizes and awards, including the Carnegie Prize, the Rembrandt Prize, the Wolf Foundation of the Arts and the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts. He was also an academician of San Fernando, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Honorary of the Royal Academy of Arts of London and of the Imperial Order of Japan, and received the Grand Cross for Humanitarian Merit from the Institution of the same name in Barcelona. In addition to his Chillida-Leku Museum in Hernani, he is represented in museums and collections around the world, such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the MOMA in New York, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Tate Gallery in London and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.