Chillida: 4 projects

music, horizon, tolerance and freedom

Chillida: 4 projects will on display in gallery 4 of the Zabalaga Farmhouse from 15 June to 30 November 2005. Four words – music, horizon, tolerance and freedom – define the theme of each of the projects in the exhibit.

The exhibition begins with an account of all of the Eduardo Chillida sculptures in public spaces, demonstrating the magnitude of the artist's work and showing the singularity and universality of these monumental works of art.

We would like to highlight four of these sculptures:

De Música, Dallas XV, corten steel, 1989. Pei's Morton Symphony Center, Dallas, USA.

Jaula de la Libertad (Cage of Freedom), corten steel, 1997. Landeszentral Bank Square, Trier, Germany.

Elogio del horizonte (Eulogy to the Horizon), concrete, 1989. Cerro de Santa Catalina, Gijón.

Mount Tindaya, unfinished, Fuerteventura.

Throughout the gallery visitors will find models of the projects mentioned above, accompanied by photographs which show the sculptures in their actual locations. There are also photographs showing the different construction procedures and elements: the wooden frames used to form the concrete sculpture Elogio al horizonte, plans, notes, drawings, collages and gravitations. In this way we hope that visitors will have better idea of the entire process from model to finished product. In more poetic words, we hope to transmit the aroma of the long and difficult path Eduardo Chillida paved through intuition and hard work.

As part of their surroundings, the sculptures shown here express Eduardo Chillida's concern for the relationship between man and nature – the horizon, the earth, sun and sea – and the relationship between man, his values and his means of expression –  tolerance in the case of Tindaya, freedom, in Jaula de la Libertad or music in De Música, Dallas XV. All of them have something in common: the importance of the place. Each one of these sculptures delimits a place in an open space. A new place built to human scale, a place which takes man not only to a new physical or aesthetic context, but also to a new context of values and experience, questioning even the physical and existential limits of being.

Tindaya, the only one of the four projects that is still unfinished, holds a very special place in this exhibition. Several models complete with illumination will show the effect of the sun on the inside of the mountain. Also on display will be a beautiful piece of local stone from the mountain, known as trachite.