Cabinet Piece #2: Eduardo Chillida: Quitting Boundaries. The Early Prints

Space in its multifaceted manifestations is the central theme of the Spanish sculptor and printmaker Eduardo Chillida. His often monumental sculptures made of iron, steel, wood, granite or alabaster explore the relationship between the void and volumes with their inherent limitations in an abstract geometrical and simultaneously sensually organic formal vocabulary.
The prints made by Chillida continuously since 1959 as an autonomous artistic line likewise oscillate between construction and poetry. He encountered the planarity of the etching, lithograph or woodcut with contrasting and suggestive pictorial strategies and compositions that generate complex conceptions of space. The exhibition presents a survey of the early prints by this extraordinary 20th-century sculptor and printmaker based on a selection of works on paper from a private collection. These prints clearly document the artist’s development from the gestures of informalism to block-like construction.

Curator: Astrid Ihle