ROME – The Cervantes Institute of Rome invites “Eduardo Chillida. A personal vision”, Wednesday 8 May 2024 at 6.00 pm. Speakers: Mikel Chillida, art critic, Javier Molins Pavía, art critic and cultural manager.
On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the great Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), the Cervantes Institute of Rome organizes a conversation with Mikel Chillida, art critic and nephew of the Artist, and Javier Molins Pavía on Wednesday 8 May at 6.00 pm in the Hall
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Since making his name on the international scene in the 1950s, Chillida’s work has been housed in major museums and art collections in Europe and the United States. His works have been commented and analyzed by eminent art historians and critics, as well as by poets and philosophers. Winner of countless awards and exhibited in numerous museums and retrospectives, his work constitutes an unavoidable reference heritage in the contemporary artistic panorama. For
Many was the best Spanish sculptor of the second half of the 20th century.
Eduardo Chillida, of Basque origin, was born in San Sebastián on 10 January 1924. After studying architecture at the University of Madrid he began to focus on drawing and sculpture. Having moved to Paris in 1948, he became friends with Pablo Palazuelo, with whom he exhibited at the Salon de Mai in 1949. In 1955 the city of San Sebastián commissioned him to create a monument to Alexander Fleming. He won the Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and, in the same year, made his first
visit to the United States, where he met James Johnson Sweeney, Mies van der Rohe and the composer Edgar Varèse. In 1960 he was awarded the Kandinsky Prize. In 1966 he met the philosopher Martin Heidegger, for whom he illustrated the book Der Kunst und der Raum. Two years later he began a sculpture for the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1971 he was Visiting Professor at the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1979 he shared the Andrew W. Mellon Prize with Willem de Kooning, to which he did
followed by a major exhibition at the Museum of Art of the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. In 1980 you exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
In 1990 the Venice Biennale dedicated a solo exhibition to him at Ca’ Pesaro.
The following year he received the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association. In 2000, the Chillida-Leku museum was inaugurated in Hernani, Gipuzkoa. He died in his residence on Mount Igueldo on August 19, 2002.
His works are present in more than 20 museums around the world. His sculptures are placed facing the sea, as in San Sebastián (Comb of the Wind, 1977) or in the mountains, as in Japan, and in cities such as Washington, Paris, Lund, Munster, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca, Guernica, Berlin and Munich. Architects and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Emil Cioran, Félix Duque and poets such as Octavio Paz have written about his work. “From space with its brother time, under the insistent gravity, feeling matter as a slower space, I wonder in amazement what I don’t know” (E. Chillida).
