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Lot Essay
'Beyond and behind knowledge, a language exists.'
Estudio Elogio del Agua I (Eulogy to the Water) is the first of a series of four studies that Chillida made for a monumental concrete sculpture entitled Elogio del Agua now situated spectacularly in front of a cliff face and suspended over a lake in the park La Cruenta del Coll in Barcelona. Essentially a stele made from cor-ten steel this version of the sculpture is the furthest removed from the suspended final version and bears a closer resemblance to Chillida's most famous monumental sculpture, the 'Wind Combs' situated on the coast near his native San Sebastian. In the same way as the great sculptures at San Sebastian, Estudio Elogio del Agua I attempts to express in purely formal and material terms something of the mystical nature of the meeting between, solid, water and empty space that takes place where the land meets the sky and the ocean.
With its grasping fingers enclosing space at the top of the work, this sculpture expresses simply and directly Chillida's often stated aim that, with iron, 'my approach...is to embrace space.' For Chillida space is as much a material as the so-called solid materials, iron, wood, marble, concrete or clay in which his forms are rendered. Space, he has described as a very quick material 'so quick that you can't see it' and iron as being a very slow material. The place where the two meet he describes as 'the limit'. It is essentially this area in which he is interested and which his sculpture attempts to articulate: the mysterious and harmonious interaction between two or more contradictory materials.
Invoking a third element, (water), Estudio Elogio del Agua I was intended to articulate something of the nature of water as a flowing liquid material. The heavily bent, almost soft-looking angles of the sculpture's steel fingers express something of the fluid nature of water as they languidly attempt to enclose the void running within and between them. In this way Chillida attempts to convey a sense that so-called solid material is, in its way, as fluid as water, and that space is as solid, tangible and as real a material as iron.
'Sculpture' is for Chillida ultimately 'a function of space. I don't mean the space outside the form, which surrounds the volume and in which the forms live, but the space generated by the forms, which lives within them and which is more effective the more unoticeably it acts. 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.' (Eduardo Chillida 'Aphorismen' cited in Chillida, exh. cat. Berlin, 1991, p.118)
Estudio Elogio del Agua I (Eulogy to the Water) is the first of a series of four studies that Chillida made for a monumental concrete sculpture entitled Elogio del Agua now situated spectacularly in front of a cliff face and suspended over a lake in the park La Cruenta del Coll in Barcelona. Essentially a stele made from cor-ten steel this version of the sculpture is the furthest removed from the suspended final version and bears a closer resemblance to Chillida's most famous monumental sculpture, the 'Wind Combs' situated on the coast near his native San Sebastian. In the same way as the great sculptures at San Sebastian, Estudio Elogio del Agua I attempts to express in purely formal and material terms something of the mystical nature of the meeting between, solid, water and empty space that takes place where the land meets the sky and the ocean.
With its grasping fingers enclosing space at the top of the work, this sculpture expresses simply and directly Chillida's often stated aim that, with iron, 'my approach...is to embrace space.' For Chillida space is as much a material as the so-called solid materials, iron, wood, marble, concrete or clay in which his forms are rendered. Space, he has described as a very quick material 'so quick that you can't see it' and iron as being a very slow material. The place where the two meet he describes as 'the limit'. It is essentially this area in which he is interested and which his sculpture attempts to articulate: the mysterious and harmonious interaction between two or more contradictory materials.
Invoking a third element, (water), Estudio Elogio del Agua I was intended to articulate something of the nature of water as a flowing liquid material. The heavily bent, almost soft-looking angles of the sculpture's steel fingers express something of the fluid nature of water as they languidly attempt to enclose the void running within and between them. In this way Chillida attempts to convey a sense that so-called solid material is, in its way, as fluid as water, and that space is as solid, tangible and as real a material as iron.
'Sculpture' is for Chillida ultimately 'a function of space. I don't mean the space outside the form, which surrounds the volume and in which the forms live, but the space generated by the forms, which lives within them and which is more effective the more unoticeably it acts. 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.' (Eduardo Chillida 'Aphorismen' cited in Chillida, exh. cat. Berlin, 1991, p.118)