Eduardo Chillida

The decisive turn came when he returned to the Basque Country in 1951 and started working with a local blacksmith near Hernani. He soon set up his own forge, and the direct physical confrontation with hot iron became the centre of his practice. Rather than casting from moulds, Chillida hammered and bent metal at the forge, reading the resistance of the material as part of the work's meaning. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard called him "the Blacksmith." From 1954 to 1966 he developed the series "Ilarik" and "Yunque de Sueños" (Anvil of Dreams), combining forged iron with wood to create forms that rise in rhythmic, branching curves. He later expanded into Corten steel, granite, concrete and alabaster.

The three Corten steel pieces known as "Peine del Viento" (The Comb of the Wind), anchored to the rocks at the western end of La Concha bay in San Sebastián, are among the most site-specific public sculptures in Europe. Conceived as early as 1952 and installed definitively in 1977, they weigh nine tonnes each and interact with tidal surges and wind - the sea literally plays the sculpture. In 1989, "De Música" was installed outside the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas: two massive steel pillars with branches reaching toward each other without touching.

Chillida rejected the label "abstract," preferring to call himself a realist who worked with space and time. Many of his titles are in Euskera, the Basque language, reflecting his deep attachment to that particular landscape and tradition. His printmaking output, catalogued at around 650 works, applied the same logic as his sculpture: layers of ink were cut and collaged to create depth and void on paper, and his lithographs for the Maeght gallery publication "Derrière le Miroir" brought his spatial thinking to a wider audience from the mid-1950s onward.

In the mid-1980s Chillida and his wife Pilar acquired the 16th-century Zabalaga farmhouse near Hernani. He spent the following years converting it into an open-air sculpture park, Chillida-Leku ("Leku" means "place" in Basque), which opened in 2000, two years before he died of Alzheimer's disease on 19 August 2002. The museum closed in 2011 and was reopened in 2019 under the stewardship of Hauser and Wirth.

On Auctionist, 21 items appear under Chillida's name, largely prints and works on paper at Spanish houses including Arce Auctions, Barcelona Auctions and Balclis, with further appearances at Neumeister and Hampel in Germany. The database also records a copy of the "Derrière le Miroir" issue dedicated to him. His broader auction market extends far beyond the Nordic region: the highest publicly recorded price for a Chillida work is approximately 4.1 million USD, achieved at Christie's Paris in 2022 for "Buscando la Luz IV" (2001).