Chillida

The urban works of Eduardo Chillida, present in numerous cities in the world, figure among the most intense and telling creations of contemporary monumental-scale sculpture. In most cases — in Spain, in the rest of Europe, and on the other side of the Atlantic — these works bring together architectural, urbanistic, and landscape aspects.

The issue that the Basque sculptor faces is the organization of forms in space, in relation either to the exterior environment in which the work is placed — as in the Wind Comb, permanently battling against the furious waves of the Canta-brian, in the idyllic peace of Gure Aitaren Etxea (House of our Fathers), in Gernika, and in Eulogy to the Horizon, in Gijón —, or to interior space, closed and sometimes hermetic, which for the artist has a stimulating, creative value. Giovanni Carandente, author of this study, analyzes not only the artistic, stylistic, and environmental, but also the ethical aspects of Chillida’s work. The sculptor’s deep social commitment endows his art with the freedom to formulate all manner of questions relating to the urban and political contexts.

Thus, his Stelae are a kind of civil message that recurrently honor thinkers, men of ingenuity and progressive politicians. Chillida pays identical homage to poets — an example of this is the House of Goethe in Frankfurt — and to artists, such as the Homage to Hokusai in distant Japan. Elsewhere he pays tribute to much cherished human vir-tues, as in his Homage to Tolerance in Seville, on the banks of the Guadalquivir, or else to nature and science, in his Eulogy to the Water in Barcelona, and De Musica, in Dallas and Santiago de Compostela, inspired by the reflections of St Augustine.

Thanks to the splendid series of photographs taken specially for this book by David Finn, to the deeply questing spirit of the author of the text, and to the commentaries on the works by Dena Merriam, the reader is provided with a comprehensive overview of Eduardo Chillida’s monumental work. The illustrations, brought together for the first time in this volume, reflect the sculptor’s aspiration to “define the hollow three-dimensional through the full three-dimensional, establishing at the same time a kind of dialogue between them... The dialogue between forms, whatever they may be, is much more important than the forms themselves”.

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An aparitie	2000
Autor	Eduardo Chillida
Dimensiuni	29 x 24,9 x 3,3 cm
Editura	Konemann
Format	Hardback
ISBN	9783829034005
Limba	Engleza
Nr pag	303