Examining Humanity Through Eduardo Chillida’s Sculptures

Too big to travel, you won’t see any public works at the new show, Eduardo Chillida: Convergence, the largest North American survey of his work in 40 years, at the San Diego Museum of Art through February 8th. 

The closest you’ll get to a public work is a virtual reality experience of the artist’s signature piece, “Comb of the Wind XV”, installed along a rocky coastline in San Sebastian in 1977. It’s a series of three iron sculptures resembling forks modeled after the layak, a traditional agrarian tool commonly used in Basque country. 

“In his early work, he was finding different farm and agrarian implements and reworking them,” notes curator Rachel Jans. Iron was a cheap, readily available material for a young artist working with limited resources. “So, he’s connecting to the tradition of agriculture and the land itself– the scope of the wind, the idea of metal implements reaching into the air. But before that, he was working with tools that worked the earth. Being open to all parts of the environment, the earth and sky, was important.”

The son of Pedro Chillida and Carmen Juantegui, a soldier and a soprano, Eduardo was raised in a musical household. One of his works is a portfolio dedicated to his favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, whose variations became a mainstay of Chillida’s aesthetic thought.

In a tribute, he wrote, “Modern as the waves, ancient as the sea, always never different, never always the same,” comparing the composer's variations to waves on a beach. It’s why, when asked by a gallerist to make editions of his work in order to increase sales, Chillida suggested variations instead.

As a young man, he played goalie for San Sebastien’s Real Sociedad Soccer Club where his father served as Second President of Football. Sidelined by a knee injury, he studied architecture at the University of Madrid, but soon enrolled in the city’s Circulo de Bellas Artes, switching to art because, “Architecture was a discipline dedicated to answers, and art was interested in questions,” the artist’s grandson, Mikel Chillida, recalls. “He was very curious, always reading philosophy, listening to music. He always said art does not belong to technique. Art is another thing. He didn’t believe you can teach another to be an artist.”

Living in Paris as a young man, Chillida frequented the Louvre and became taken with classical sculpture, the inspiration for early figurative works in plaster. But after a visit to Greece, he decided that Mediterranean light was white and that Basque country was dark, prompting a switch to iron, the material with which he is most associated. 

“He was drawn to the traditional method of forging, blacksmithing, which goes back centuries in the Basque country,” says Jans, noting the blacksmith forge nearby Chillida’s house that he wandered into one day. “He went straight to work with iron and devoted the next ten years to it.”

The show that made him was a solo exhibit of 27 pieces at Paris’ Galerie Maecht in 1956. There’s an AbEx quality to some of the works, capturing the era’s zeitgeist, but also exploring how space is shaped by metal, the harmony and conflict between entity and ether.

“Space is really the matiere of these works. It is almost palpable as it cascades from plane to plane, moves slowly at the viewer with a flowering motion or retreats obliquely…” wrote poet John Ashbery upon viewing Chillida’s work.

The artist’s new friend, philosopher Gaston Bachelard, published “The Cosmos of Iron” about the show, saying the sculptor wanted “iron to reveal realities of the air to us.” In “Art and Space”, inspired by Chillida’s works, Martin Heidegger observes that when “occupied by the sculptured structure, space receives its special character as closed, breached and empty volume.”

Winning the International Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1958 catapulted Chillida to wider fame. Within a few years, his work was shown at MoMA, and the oaken sculpture, “Rough Chant I”, was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. That sculpture and the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Rough Chant III” are shown together in San Diego for the first time since 1966.

“The piece in the Chicago collection was quite a feat to bring it here, cause it cannot come apart,” grouses Jans. “It’s 3,200 pounds of oak, and it traveled in a crate in a truck and was installed at the exhibition. So, we’re really fortunate to have this work.”

In addition to iron and oak, Chillida worked in ink on paper, as well as paper collage, both coming together in his “Gravitation” series of the 1980s. Also included are works from the 1990s made from Chamotte clay.

“He made his first alabaster piece in 1965,” notes Jans. “He’s often thinking about landmarks, geography, and sometimes architecture itself with the alabaster pieces.” 

A series of untitled alabaster works eventually lead to 1979’s “Homage to Goethe V”, followed by “Empty Mountains I” five years later. Both set the stage for what was to be the crowning achievement of his career– Tindaya, a mountain in the Canary Islands which was to be hollowed out, with openings emitting shafts of light, and the horizon line visible from the entry. 

“You imagine yourself going into the structure and how small you are,” observes Jans. “It’s a perspective on humanity that nature is more significant than we are.”

After a search for the right mountain in places as far flung as Italy, Switzerland, and Finland, Chillida settled on Tendaya, which happened to be a quarry at the time. 

“It’s a philosophical way of trying to find that inner space where we are what we are,” explains Mikel about Tindaya. “You could be the most regular guy in the world, you could even be the President of the United States, but what you feel once you enter that spot is the same. You are nothing in that space. And then when you get out of there, you realize that space that was making you feel so tiny is nothing, that it’s only 0.3 of the mass of the mountain. It doesn’t matter what we do, we are all exactly equal. We are all brothers.”

Before his death in 2002, Chillida wrote, "The sculpture has been conceived as a monument to tolerance and a work of art for the Canary people." At the time, the project was stalled by conservation groups. Tindaya was a sacred mountain to ancient peoples of the island whose markings decorate some of the stones. Today, the project has no future.

As a boy, Mikel Chillida remembers large family gatherings, long feasts, and music, his grandfather always an active participant. Once, when he tossed him a beanbag, his grandfather dropped it and became fascinated with the structure of his own hand, studying it for the next two hours (ink drawings of his hand are also in the show).

“What made him an artist is he was a very curious guy. He was, all the time, trying to see what you're not able to see in the first moment,” says Mikel. “I’ve been lucky to know my grandfather. And, he was an incredible artist, absolutely, but he was even a better person, as a human. To me, that means a lot. So, we are committed to keeping his legacy alive.”