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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, under number 1959.004.
"My approach to iron is to embrace space. There is always a fight between iron and space, but iron is always open in relation to the space." (Chillida cited in the film Chillida RM Arts and ETB Euskal Telebista (Basque Television) 1985)
Chillida's 'Yunque de Sueños' (Anvil of Dreams) series of sculptures is an exquisite group of sixteen small-scale works made by the artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taking their poetic title from the artist's notion 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, mixing what Carola Geidion -Welcker once described as "precise craftwork...free imagination, 'iron' discipline and winged fantasy." (Carola Giedion-Welcker cited in Eduardo Chillida: Praise of Iron exh. cat. IVAM Valencia, 2002, p. 203.)
Articulating a sense of the spiritual in the meeting point between two opposites, the 'Yunque de Sueños' sculptures represent the coming together of infinite space and raw solid material in one visually poetic unity of abstract form. The sacred nature of this meeting point is celebrated by Chillida's intuitive extension of the solid iron into a playful dance with the void. The solid wrought iron of a work like Yunque de Sueños VI articulates and describes less its own material nature than the influence and impression of the space around it and upon it. 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) A sense of this Einsteinian-inspired notion of space as both a material and temporal dimension provides the key to an understanding of all Chillida's work and at the same time is the central element of these early sculptures whose poetic title is suggestive of the metaphysical dimension of Chillida's art.
Material expressions of the sublime nature of infinite space and its active and material presence in the world, Chillida's 'Yunque de Sueños' sculptures are both powerful artistic and existential statements in that they reveal the ever-present inter-penetration of the void in both the material and spiritual life of the individual. As their title suggests, the 'Yunque de Sueños' exist in both the real world of material reality and in a metaphysical world of dreams, ideals and imagination. Wrought by hand through the hammering and forging of the iron on the anvil and the subsequent shaping and stretching of its molten state into a visual expression of the way it both penetrates and is penetrated by the mysterious, intangible space all around it, these exquisite works embrace and celebrate the void of space as both a material and a spiritual entity.
"My approach to iron is to embrace space. There is always a fight between iron and space, but iron is always open in relation to the space." (Chillida cited in the film Chillida RM Arts and ETB Euskal Telebista (Basque Television) 1985)
Chillida's 'Yunque de Sueños' (Anvil of Dreams) series of sculptures is an exquisite group of sixteen small-scale works made by the artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taking their poetic title from the artist's notion 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, mixing what Carola Geidion -Welcker once described as "precise craftwork...free imagination, 'iron' discipline and winged fantasy." (Carola Giedion-Welcker cited in Eduardo Chillida: Praise of Iron exh. cat. IVAM Valencia, 2002, p. 203.)
Articulating a sense of the spiritual in the meeting point between two opposites, the 'Yunque de Sueños' sculptures represent the coming together of infinite space and raw solid material in one visually poetic unity of abstract form. The sacred nature of this meeting point is celebrated by Chillida's intuitive extension of the solid iron into a playful dance with the void. The solid wrought iron of a work like Yunque de Sueños VI articulates and describes less its own material nature than the influence and impression of the space around it and upon it. 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) A sense of this Einsteinian-inspired notion of space as both a material and temporal dimension provides the key to an understanding of all Chillida's work and at the same time is the central element of these early sculptures whose poetic title is suggestive of the metaphysical dimension of Chillida's art.
Material expressions of the sublime nature of infinite space and its active and material presence in the world, Chillida's 'Yunque de Sueños' sculptures are both powerful artistic and existential statements in that they reveal the ever-present inter-penetration of the void in both the material and spiritual life of the individual. As their title suggests, the 'Yunque de Sueños' exist in both the real world of material reality and in a metaphysical world of dreams, ideals and imagination. Wrought by hand through the hammering and forging of the iron on the anvil and the subsequent shaping and stretching of its molten state into a visual expression of the way it both penetrates and is penetrated by the mysterious, intangible space all around it, these exquisite works embrace and celebrate the void of space as both a material and a spiritual entity.