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Chillida’s influence on the art of the 20th century

The presentation of the great Basque artist Eduardo Chillida begins with Manos Stefanidis, who will talk about the artist’ influence on art, sculpture and in Greece.

Manos Stefanidis

Author, art critic, professor emeritus of History of Art at the department of theatre studies school of philosophy of the University of Athens, feuilleton for many newspapers and magazines for years, in charge of endless catalogues, organized dozens of exhibitions.  In 1990 he was the commissioner of Greece in the Venice Biennale. Since 1985 he is a member of AICA. He organized and directed the branch of the National Gallery in Corfu (1990-1995 ). In 2005 he was elected member of the Hellenic Author Society.   And before I go on my merry way, if I may, let me just highlight a random selection of his books.

Eduardo Chillida; Construction and poetry

Mikel Chillida

Chillida. Monumental work

Nausica Sanchez

Chillida's and Heidegger's Conception of Space, Time, Place, and Void in the Context of the Artists' Book The Art and the Space

Martin Heidegger and Eduardo Chillida held a rich and fertile intellectual exchange in 1968 and 1969, by the time they were preparing the artists' book Die Kunst und der Raum ("The Art and the Space"), which was to contain a text on art and space, written by Heidegger, as well as seven litho-collages and one lithography created by Chillida. The lecture deals with the similarity that exists between the German philosopher's and the Spanish-Basque sculptor's conception of space and time, place and void. Opposite to scientific and transcendental concepts, which follow the ideal of precision, measurement, and verification, Heidegger's ontological and Chillida's artistic conceptions understand space and place in connection with time and void as something dynamic, inseparable from life and human experience, which is not simply "given", but has to be looked for and realized.

Ana María Rabe

Dr. phil., is Full Professor, Chair of Contemporary Philosophy, at the University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. She is Head of the Research Project "The Work of Memory between Representation and Experience. Epistemological Fundaments and Reach of Aesthetic Processes in Intercultural Perspective", funded by the Committee for the Development of Research, University of Antioquia. She also belongs to two other Research Groups of the Spanish National Research Councial (CSIC) in Madrid. In 2013, she held the first Eduardo Chillida Chair at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main.

Space Time Architecture according to Chillida

The keywords describing the oeuvre of Eduardo Chillida — space, matter, time, void, relationships — configure a wonderful mise-en-scène of the fundamental principles of modern physics, examined, too, by a phenomenologist approach, favoured by his close relationship with Martin Heidegger.

Chillida stresses the need to look further than the Pillars of Hercules, to go beyond what is known, to dare to disobey established rules and transcend acquired truths.

This is a highly modern view, which not only echoes the outlook of contemporary scientific research, but also informs high-profile contemporary approaches to architecture.

His main goal as a sculptor was to capture and reveal empty space inside the matter.

Just as in the dialectic of Taoist thought, space and time need each other: matter may yield inner space to emptiness, thus giving it shape, while emptiness has an undeniable materiality.

Yet, sculptural space is not just a three-dimensional space; it is also a visual, auditory, emotional combination, arising prior to the separation of the senses: the void becomes a "vital", "existential", "bodily" entity, carved out of matter.

The monumental public art produced by Chillida from the 1970s onwards testifies to his strategic skill in interpreting and projecting spatial relationships, faithfully transferring the vision underpinning his sculptural oeuvre to an architectural scale and dimension. In this way his work engages in a remarkable manner with the components of landscape — light, horizon, sea, sky — or with architectural features of the urban setting, being strongly site-specific and highly "architectural".

In these works he transcends the rigid barriers of Euclidean geometry and the Cartesian spirit, to construct his own geometries and architectures, which are unarguably heterodox and often vindicate the views and methods of much contemporary architecture, sharing its interest in spatial dynamics and topology.

Renato Bochi

Renato Bocchi (Trento, 1949), is full professor of architectural and urban design at the Iuav University of Venice, where he was director of the Department of architectural design from 2006 to 2009. He is currently teaching Theories of architecture within the master's degree in Visual Arts and Fashion Design. He has held seminars, workshops and conferences in many European universities and has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, in 2005 and 2011.

The main field of his research is the relationship between architecture, art and landscape. He was editor of the magazine 'Restauro & Città' (1990-95) and director of the architectural magazine 'Archint', 1998-2000. He currently directs for the publisher Gangemi, Rome, the series 'Spazio Paesaggio Architettura' and for the Aracne editions the series 'Re-cycle Italy', the result of the three-year research programme he coordinated between 2013 and 2016.

His numerous publications include: La materia del vuoto, Universalia, Pordenone, 2015, Progettare lo spazio e il movimento, Gangemi, Rome, 2010, Spazio arte architettura. Un percorso teorico, Carocci, Rome, 2022.