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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, under number no. 1984.005.
One of an important series of sculptures that Eduardo Chillida made at different stages throughout his career, Elogio del Vacío V (Eulogy to the Void V) is, as its poetic title suggests, an almost organic formal expression of empty space executed in corten steel, the weatherless steel that Chillida favoured for the creation of all his outside ironworks. Chillida's sculptures embody a world of conflicting dualities, iron and wind, granite and light, paper and steel, solid and void. In Elogio del Vacío V Chillida captures a moment of equilibrium delicately balancing these oppositions. The sculpture counterpoints its stark materiality with a lightness of touch; its metal tentacles avoiding blunt intersections in favour of a continuous flow of energy. Chillida's sculpture embraces space rather than encloses it, celebrates the void, rather than stifles it. Chillida had compared this space to the flight of a bird: 'all the conceivable possibilities of a spatial figure in its twisting and turnings...a figure in which void and mass are bound to a common axis and each relieves the other.' (Eduardo Chillida quoted in Elogio del Hiero, exh. cat., Valencia, 2002, pp. 62-63).
Bought from Chillida by his friend and patron, the Dallas collector Frank Ribelin, it is one of several major works by the artist that serve as a testament to these two men's enduring collaborative partnership. From the 1980s onwards, Chillida's international legacy was greatly enhanced by Ribelin. Of the significant collection that Ribelin - who had been involved in a variety of businesses including his own fibreglass company, Riberglass - accumulated, the works by Chillida that he acquired formed the core. Many of these, such as Silent Music II now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for example, have since entered major public collections in the United States of America as donations from Ribelin who, renowned for his philanthropy, often helped to bolster the collections of various museums and even established the foundation of others. Ribelin had been in contact with Chillida for several years, meeting him frequently and acquiring several works from him before he embarked on his most ambitious collaboration with the artist.
In 1988, he commissioned a monumental sculpture from Chillida to adorn the Morton H. Mayerson Symphony Center in Dallas, a building that was being designed by the celebrated architect I.M. Pei. Chillida leapt at the chance, having long sought to work in collaboration with Pei and this ambitious project resulted in his vast sculpture De Musica, unveiled in 1989. It was the first work by Chillida to feature in a public space in the USA. Like all the works in the series with the title 'Eulogy to the Void', this work from 1984, is essentially a solid block of corten steel above which an architecture-like structure gives formal expression to the empty space in and around it. It has often been noted for example, that in Chillida's sculpture it is, in fact, space itself that seems to have been wrought on his anvil, and space - that infinite invisible material of the void - that is in effect, the real material of his art. Employing the pliable, tensile strength of the material in its molten state to stretch into curvaceous linear forms, Elogio del Vacío V is an articulation in wrought metal - a solid, material expression - of the intangibility and nothingness of the void, and its pervasive and for Chillida, almost mystical presence within our lives. With its extraordinary steel tentacles forged into place, the sculpture emulates earlier sculptural precedents such as the clasped hands of Auguste Rodin's 1908 The Cathedral or Alberto Giacometti's 1934 Hands Holding the Void, Elogio del Vaco V is in many ways an abstract extension of these same principles into a simpler and more organic language of material and form. An open-form cage-like structure both encasing and itself penetrated by emptiness, this work is, as its title suggests, a kind of cathedral of the void. With its heavy solid steel base directly opposed by the lyrical openness of its linear top, the sculpture is both a powerful material manifestation of Chillida's belief that it is the nature of iron or steel always to attempt to enclose or 'embrace' space and a demonstration of the artist's near-mystical belief in a universal hidden language of form. 'Beyond and behind knowledge', he once said, 'a language exists.' (Chillida, quoted in the film Chillida, RM Arts and ETB Euskal Telebista (Basque Television), 1985).
One of an important series of sculptures that Eduardo Chillida made at different stages throughout his career, Elogio del Vacío V (Eulogy to the Void V) is, as its poetic title suggests, an almost organic formal expression of empty space executed in corten steel, the weatherless steel that Chillida favoured for the creation of all his outside ironworks. Chillida's sculptures embody a world of conflicting dualities, iron and wind, granite and light, paper and steel, solid and void. In Elogio del Vacío V Chillida captures a moment of equilibrium delicately balancing these oppositions. The sculpture counterpoints its stark materiality with a lightness of touch; its metal tentacles avoiding blunt intersections in favour of a continuous flow of energy. Chillida's sculpture embraces space rather than encloses it, celebrates the void, rather than stifles it. Chillida had compared this space to the flight of a bird: 'all the conceivable possibilities of a spatial figure in its twisting and turnings...a figure in which void and mass are bound to a common axis and each relieves the other.' (Eduardo Chillida quoted in Elogio del Hiero, exh. cat., Valencia, 2002, pp. 62-63).
Bought from Chillida by his friend and patron, the Dallas collector Frank Ribelin, it is one of several major works by the artist that serve as a testament to these two men's enduring collaborative partnership. From the 1980s onwards, Chillida's international legacy was greatly enhanced by Ribelin. Of the significant collection that Ribelin - who had been involved in a variety of businesses including his own fibreglass company, Riberglass - accumulated, the works by Chillida that he acquired formed the core. Many of these, such as Silent Music II now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for example, have since entered major public collections in the United States of America as donations from Ribelin who, renowned for his philanthropy, often helped to bolster the collections of various museums and even established the foundation of others. Ribelin had been in contact with Chillida for several years, meeting him frequently and acquiring several works from him before he embarked on his most ambitious collaboration with the artist.
In 1988, he commissioned a monumental sculpture from Chillida to adorn the Morton H. Mayerson Symphony Center in Dallas, a building that was being designed by the celebrated architect I.M. Pei. Chillida leapt at the chance, having long sought to work in collaboration with Pei and this ambitious project resulted in his vast sculpture De Musica, unveiled in 1989. It was the first work by Chillida to feature in a public space in the USA. Like all the works in the series with the title 'Eulogy to the Void', this work from 1984, is essentially a solid block of corten steel above which an architecture-like structure gives formal expression to the empty space in and around it. It has often been noted for example, that in Chillida's sculpture it is, in fact, space itself that seems to have been wrought on his anvil, and space - that infinite invisible material of the void - that is in effect, the real material of his art. Employing the pliable, tensile strength of the material in its molten state to stretch into curvaceous linear forms, Elogio del Vacío V is an articulation in wrought metal - a solid, material expression - of the intangibility and nothingness of the void, and its pervasive and for Chillida, almost mystical presence within our lives. With its extraordinary steel tentacles forged into place, the sculpture emulates earlier sculptural precedents such as the clasped hands of Auguste Rodin's 1908 The Cathedral or Alberto Giacometti's 1934 Hands Holding the Void, Elogio del Vaco V is in many ways an abstract extension of these same principles into a simpler and more organic language of material and form. An open-form cage-like structure both encasing and itself penetrated by emptiness, this work is, as its title suggests, a kind of cathedral of the void. With its heavy solid steel base directly opposed by the lyrical openness of its linear top, the sculpture is both a powerful material manifestation of Chillida's belief that it is the nature of iron or steel always to attempt to enclose or 'embrace' space and a demonstration of the artist's near-mystical belief in a universal hidden language of form. 'Beyond and behind knowledge', he once said, 'a language exists.' (Chillida, quoted in the film Chillida, RM Arts and ETB Euskal Telebista (Basque Television), 1985).