Eduardo Chillida: Gezna IV

Eduardo Chillida is a Basque sculptor known especially for his monumental abstract sculptures. When it comes to prints, he mostly created etchings and aquatints, to which he transferred elements of his iron sculptures that he combined into abstract compositions. In 1971, he received the international jury prize at the 9th International Exhibition of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana for his etchings from the Gezna series. One of them is also our latest acquisition in the Biennale Prize Winners Collection, which has come from a private collection.

Chillida’s prints from the late 1960s are characterised primarily by their sound composition with the predominance of black and white, which became his main means of expression. He joined the two with strokes, lines or various textures, which gave his works a changing spatial quality.

In the etching Gezna IV (1969), we can notice how black areas fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces, capture and enclose spaces and, in the artist’s concern with the general volumetric conception, take on almost labyrinth-like shapes. This monochrome but visually strong contrast became the artist’s signature and brought him international recognition.