San Sebastián.- The entire sculptural work of Eduardo Chillida has already been collected in a raisonné catalogue. The publication of the fourth volume completes a work that covers the entire creative period of the Basque artist, from 1948 to 2002.
The wide temporal range of Chillida’s career, the dispersion of his work throughout the world and the difficulty in accessing some pieces in the hands of collectors who are jealous of their privacy have been some of the drawbacks of a project that was projected to take five years. and it has lasted ten.
Last volume of the catalog raisonné by Eduardo Chillida
The authors of the catalogue, Ignacio Chillida, son of the sculptor, and Alberto Cobo, head of the Succession Eduardo Chillida, explained it this Thursday at a press conference. Marta Casares, CEO of the Nerea publishing house, and Ander Aizpurua, CEO of Kutxa Fundazioa, also participated.
The missing volume brings together in 444 pages the 455 sculptures that the creator from San Sebastián made from 1991 to 2002. Its publication is “the starting signal” of the activities that will celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth, born on January 10 of 1924, and of which the family and those responsible for Chillida Leku will report later.
The last part of the catalog raisonné has been presented at the Hernani museum, which, like the rest, will cost 115 euros. Its publication has been materialized by the financial support of the Kutxa Fundazioa, since it is “impossible” to publish a book of these characteristics solely with private resources, as Marta Casares has remarked.
Main source for academic and research papers
Cobo has said that the catalog now stands as the “main source” of academic papers and research on Chillida’s sculptural creation. Each work contains data on the date of creation, the title, the material, the exhibitions in which she has participated, her whereabouts and bibliography.
“A catalog raisonné legitimizes and consolidates the corpus of an artist’s work and ensures its veracity”, Cobo has remarked, who has pointed out that during its preparation they have corrected errors found in other books and exhibition catalogues, such as dating and inverted photographs.
Whoever decides to have a “better understanding” of Chillida’s work now has four volumes totaling 2,000 pages and 1,873 illustrations of more than 1,400 sculptures, to which is added the catalog raisonné of the Basque artist’s graphic work.
The drawings are still pending, but this is presented as an almost impossible task because it is a very wide world that you have to keep track of and not as orderly as that of his other work, since the one that was his gallery, Maeght, had a fulfilled record of her, with which the family later continued.
“They offered it to us and we said no, we had no chance to do it,” said Ignacio Chillida.