BARCELONA, SPAIN.- The Fundació Joan Miró just opened the exhibition “Chillida,” on view through January 25, 2004. The exhibition was officially inaugurated by King Juan Carlos of Spain. Chillida is an exhibition organised by the Joan Miró Foundation in collaboration with Chillida-Leku and sponsored by the BBVA. It is the first retrospective of the work of Eduardo Chillida since his death on 19 August 2002 and is a tribute to an artist who was a good friend of Joan Miró’s and one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century. 

The exhibition will contain over 100 pieces, from Chillida-Leku and from 23 public and private collections around the world: drawings, sculptures, Lurras (terracottas) and Gravitations that illustrate all the varied aspects of Chillida’s work, from his figurative beginnings in Paris in the late 1940s, the shift to abstraction with his discovery of iron in the 1950s, and his progress towards experimentation with space, the void and the properties of the different materials used. 

The show’s chronological arrangement emphasises the significance of the exploration of space in Chillida’s work. In the same way that music, which was so important to him, is made up of sounds and silences, his sculpture is made up of the matter he uses and the space he creates. Space, void and limit are the essential elements of his art. Even his drawings show this analysis of space, being schematic, simplified and almost sculptural.  

A special section is devoted to the Gravitations, or reliefs on paper, with which Chillida managed to give drawing a three-dimensional quality. Some of these include ink or pencil, others are totally blank: pure relief without a vestige of colour. 

Parallel to the exhibition, a seminar on Approaches to contemporary sculpture will be held in conjunction with Barcelona University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, sponsored by the BBVA, in which leading experts will speak about the principal milestones in twentieth-century sculpture.