Eduardo Chillida

Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) is among the sculptors who have contributed most decisively to the vocabulary of abstract sculpture, and to its material innovations, in twentieth-century European art - although he himself envisaged abstraction as simply a truer ''realism,'' as an undistorted account of material properties. Along with clay, stone and concrete, Chillida particularly favoured wrought iron, using it to achieve robust sensations of both mass and movement, at once affirming solidity and defying gravity. Chillida's writings, published here for the first time, take the reader into the sculptor's independent-minded musings on the nature of sculpture. These philosophical and theoretical reflections, and the practical and interpretive notes he made on his work, make for a basic manual on sculpture, a uniquely articulate meditation on forms and a clue into the energies at play in his work.