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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku under no. 1956.009.
Executed in 1956, the same year as his first one-man exhibition held at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, Katezale (Enchained) is an early and seminal iron sculpture by Eduardo Chillida. One of the largest works to be carried out by this stage of his career, it marks the beginning of the artist's pioneering investigations into scale and the architecture of space. In Katezale, the artist has twisted and reversed, bent and curved his iron bars over the anvil to create an almost rhythmic assembly of forms, tumbling with their own momentum. Created shortly after his return to his native Basque country, it is forged out of rich, robust iron, wrought in the heat of the blacksmith's inferno. The sculpture has a deep lustrous quality, its dark, ferrous patina reflecting the scorched earth of San Sebastián. Freely supporting itself and resting on two points, the majestic sculpture stretches out horizontally, its form curling like the fingers of a gently clenched hand or the rounded ribcage. One follows the other like the harmonious arrangement of notes that create a symphony, the series of waves that make a tide or the rounded links that create a chain. In Katezale, the work's title directly refers to this pattern of repeated forms, indeed in Euskera, the artist's mother tongue, Katezale translates as the art of making chains. At first the links appear broken, interrupted by volumes of space that pass around and through the structure. For Chillida however, this negative space is integral to his project, it is the space that completes each bond, the real material of his sculpture. As the artist himself once described, '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' (E. Chillida quoted in K. Barañano (ed.), Eduardo Chillida: Elogio del Hierro, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, 2002, pp. 62-63).
This radical understanding of space and celebration of the void is integral to Chillida's practice. Throughout his career, he has kept faith with this principle and in 1968 he crucially met Martin Heidegger leading to the publication of Die Kunst und der Raum (Art and Space). An essay inspired by the artist's work, it posited space as something living in relation to man, with sculpture as the privileged means of its articulation. In Katezale, the stark materiality of the iron structure encloses and is simultaneously penetrated by an invisible and dynamic space. As Chillida himself once described: 'you could compare it to the breath that swells and contracts forms that opens up their space - inaccessible to and hidden from the outside world - to view. I do not see it as something abstract, but a reality as solid as the volume that envelops it' (E. Chillida quoted in I. Busch, 'Eduardo Chillida, Architect of the Void: On the Synthesis of Architecture and Sculpture', Chillida 1948-1998, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1998, p. 66).
Katezale marks Chillida's early investigations into iron, the material that has become so emblematic of his oeuvre. The metal connects the artist with his roots in the Basque Country, a land where the dark soil abounds with minerals and where the physical exertion of iron working has become tradition. This art of ironmongery is something that he first turned to upon his return from Paris in 1951. In Paris he had studied architecture, at the same time creating art by modeling plaster and clay in figurative forms such as busts and figures of horsemen. These subjects rapidly changed upon the artist's arrival with his new wife Pilar Belzunce at Villa Vista-Allegre in Hernani. It was here that he discovered iron, and what Ina Busch has described as the 'dark light' of the Atlantic Coast.
Like the Romanian artist Constanin Brancusi before him, Chillida employs the 'taille direct' method, physically engaging in the practice of iron working. Borrowing the local smith's workshop every morning, Chillida began a hard apprenticeship, handling the bellows, stirring up the fire and fundamentally taking note of how the quality of iron, its texture and colour transforms with heat. As Kosme de Barañano has suggested, whilst 'iron is present in all of Chillida's creative periods never again does the approach to the material and the configuration of space seem to be achieved so directly by the artist as in the early sculptures of the fifties' (K. Barañano (ed.), Eduardo Chillida: Elogio del Hierro, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, 2002, p. 63). The use of metallurgy was first introduced into the sculptural vernacular in 1911 by the Spanish sculptors Pablo Gargallo and Julio González. Rather than welding like his forbearers however, Chillida only ever employed traditional wrought iron, avoiding blunt intersections in favour of a seamless flow of energy.
With its extraordinary limbs grasping at the free and fast 'material' of space, Katezale prefigures the monumental Peine del Viento (Wind Comb) that Chillida completed in San Sebastián in 1977. With its majestic sculpted architecture, Peine del Viento gestures out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Situated as it is upon its exposed promontory, the full violence of the elements and the epic wind penetrates its form. It represents the large-scale expression of the radical spatial concept Chillida so artfully pioneered in Katezale.
Executed in 1956, the same year as his first one-man exhibition held at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, Katezale (Enchained) is an early and seminal iron sculpture by Eduardo Chillida. One of the largest works to be carried out by this stage of his career, it marks the beginning of the artist's pioneering investigations into scale and the architecture of space. In Katezale, the artist has twisted and reversed, bent and curved his iron bars over the anvil to create an almost rhythmic assembly of forms, tumbling with their own momentum. Created shortly after his return to his native Basque country, it is forged out of rich, robust iron, wrought in the heat of the blacksmith's inferno. The sculpture has a deep lustrous quality, its dark, ferrous patina reflecting the scorched earth of San Sebastián. Freely supporting itself and resting on two points, the majestic sculpture stretches out horizontally, its form curling like the fingers of a gently clenched hand or the rounded ribcage. One follows the other like the harmonious arrangement of notes that create a symphony, the series of waves that make a tide or the rounded links that create a chain. In Katezale, the work's title directly refers to this pattern of repeated forms, indeed in Euskera, the artist's mother tongue, Katezale translates as the art of making chains. At first the links appear broken, interrupted by volumes of space that pass around and through the structure. For Chillida however, this negative space is integral to his project, it is the space that completes each bond, the real material of his sculpture. As the artist himself once described, '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' (E. Chillida quoted in K. Barañano (ed.), Eduardo Chillida: Elogio del Hierro, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, 2002, pp. 62-63).
This radical understanding of space and celebration of the void is integral to Chillida's practice. Throughout his career, he has kept faith with this principle and in 1968 he crucially met Martin Heidegger leading to the publication of Die Kunst und der Raum (Art and Space). An essay inspired by the artist's work, it posited space as something living in relation to man, with sculpture as the privileged means of its articulation. In Katezale, the stark materiality of the iron structure encloses and is simultaneously penetrated by an invisible and dynamic space. As Chillida himself once described: 'you could compare it to the breath that swells and contracts forms that opens up their space - inaccessible to and hidden from the outside world - to view. I do not see it as something abstract, but a reality as solid as the volume that envelops it' (E. Chillida quoted in I. Busch, 'Eduardo Chillida, Architect of the Void: On the Synthesis of Architecture and Sculpture', Chillida 1948-1998, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1998, p. 66).
Katezale marks Chillida's early investigations into iron, the material that has become so emblematic of his oeuvre. The metal connects the artist with his roots in the Basque Country, a land where the dark soil abounds with minerals and where the physical exertion of iron working has become tradition. This art of ironmongery is something that he first turned to upon his return from Paris in 1951. In Paris he had studied architecture, at the same time creating art by modeling plaster and clay in figurative forms such as busts and figures of horsemen. These subjects rapidly changed upon the artist's arrival with his new wife Pilar Belzunce at Villa Vista-Allegre in Hernani. It was here that he discovered iron, and what Ina Busch has described as the 'dark light' of the Atlantic Coast.
Like the Romanian artist Constanin Brancusi before him, Chillida employs the 'taille direct' method, physically engaging in the practice of iron working. Borrowing the local smith's workshop every morning, Chillida began a hard apprenticeship, handling the bellows, stirring up the fire and fundamentally taking note of how the quality of iron, its texture and colour transforms with heat. As Kosme de Barañano has suggested, whilst 'iron is present in all of Chillida's creative periods never again does the approach to the material and the configuration of space seem to be achieved so directly by the artist as in the early sculptures of the fifties' (K. Barañano (ed.), Eduardo Chillida: Elogio del Hierro, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, 2002, p. 63). The use of metallurgy was first introduced into the sculptural vernacular in 1911 by the Spanish sculptors Pablo Gargallo and Julio González. Rather than welding like his forbearers however, Chillida only ever employed traditional wrought iron, avoiding blunt intersections in favour of a seamless flow of energy.
With its extraordinary limbs grasping at the free and fast 'material' of space, Katezale prefigures the monumental Peine del Viento (Wind Comb) that Chillida completed in San Sebastián in 1977. With its majestic sculpted architecture, Peine del Viento gestures out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Situated as it is upon its exposed promontory, the full violence of the elements and the epic wind penetrates its form. It represents the large-scale expression of the radical spatial concept Chillida so artfully pioneered in Katezale.