Italian
ROME. One hundred years after the birth of the great Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), the Cervantes Institute of Rome celebrates him with a significant exhibition of 41 works, a true retrospective of his artistic career through the two main mediums he worked with: drawing, on paper created by him, and sculpture.
The exhibition, hosted in the Dalì Room overlooking Piazza Navona, will remain open until January 11, 2025. After thirty-two years, the works of the great artist return to Rome, who became known since the fifties with exhibitions in museums and art collections in Europe and the United States.
Winner of countless awards, his works have been commented and analyzed by distinguished historians and art critics, as well as by philosophers and poets. Exceptionally, four works are exhibited in this show, iron sculptures, which earned Chillida the Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1958, including “Gesto” from the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.
Chillida, considered one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century, had a very intense relationship with Italy despite feeling deeply Basque. In fact, he wrote: “In my Basque country, I feel in my place, like a tree suited to its territory, a tree on its land but with arms reaching towards the sky.”
The Roman exhibition begins with a series of figurative drawings from the early period, drawings that focus on the hands, one of Chillida’s recurring themes. He attempted a challenging task for himself: to draw with his left hand, even though he was right-handed. He wanted to relive the adventure of learning something he knew how to do only with his right hand, using his left hand instead.
Interesting are the 17 “gravitations”, reliefs of layers of paper, cut and partly painted with black ink, bound and hung by ropes. Chillida first exhibited the Gravitations in 1988 in Madrid, they are delicate two-dimensional works in black and white, exploring the qualities and limits of space by overlapping layers of paper connected by threads and suspended to allow air circulation. These works are evocative because they define, in their lightness, a plastic articulation of architecture that alternates concave and convex volumes. His sculptures exhibited in the show are characterized by great dynamism and the absence of the right angle, as the artist stated: “The right angle seemed to me the most beautiful of all angles, but it is a bit intolerant, it does not allow dialogue except with its equals.” All his works are a meditation on presence and absence, pieces that interact with the surrounding environment, engaging with the viewer, as Chillida said: “I do not represent, I inquire.”
