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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, under number 1958003.
Chillida's Yunque de Sueños (Anvil of Dreams) series of sculptures is an exquisite group of small-scale works that the artist made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taking their poetic title from the notion Chillida has of forging a new art of sublime and universal resonance on a metaphorical anvil, the Yunque de Sueños sculptures articulate the essence of Chillida's aesthetic aims, blending what Carola Giedion-Welcker once described as "precise craftwork and free imagination, 'iron' discipline and winged fantasy." (Carola Giedion-Welcker cited in Eduardo Chillida: Praise of Iron exhib.cat. IVAM Valencia, 2002, p. 203.)
Small in scale, the Yunque de Sueños sculptures represent the coming together of space and material into a visually poetic unity of form. The solid metal form of Yunque de Sueños III articulates and describes less its own nature than the influence and impression of the space around it upon its own form. Cast in bronze, the metal wing-like form of the sculpture seems softened by the invasion of space into its form. Space, Chillida has explained, "is a quick material, very quick, so quick in fact that we have the impression that there is nothing there." (Chillida cited in the film Chillida RM Arts and ETB Euskal Telebista (Basque Television) 1985) This Einsteinian-inspired notion of space as both a material and temporal dimension impregnates all of Chillida's finest sculptures. In Yunque de Sueños III this active material concept of space seems almost tangible in the way that Chillida has wrought the tripartite metal form around its infinite dimension.
Chillida's Yunque de Sueños (Anvil of Dreams) series of sculptures is an exquisite group of small-scale works that the artist made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taking their poetic title from the notion Chillida has of forging a new art of sublime and universal resonance on a metaphorical anvil, the Yunque de Sueños sculptures articulate the essence of Chillida's aesthetic aims, blending what Carola Giedion-Welcker once described as "precise craftwork and free imagination, 'iron' discipline and winged fantasy." (Carola Giedion-Welcker cited in Eduardo Chillida: Praise of Iron exhib.cat. IVAM Valencia, 2002, p. 203.)
Small in scale, the Yunque de Sueños sculptures represent the coming together of space and material into a visually poetic unity of form. The solid metal form of Yunque de Sueños III articulates and describes less its own nature than the influence and impression of the space around it upon its own form. Cast in bronze, the metal wing-like form of the sculpture seems softened by the invasion of space into its form. Space, Chillida has explained, "is a quick material, very quick, so quick in fact that we have the impression that there is nothing there." (Chillida cited in the film Chillida RM Arts and ETB Euskal Telebista (Basque Television) 1985) This Einsteinian-inspired notion of space as both a material and temporal dimension impregnates all of Chillida's finest sculptures. In Yunque de Sueños III this active material concept of space seems almost tangible in the way that Chillida has wrought the tripartite metal form around its infinite dimension.