"Chillidaren etxea" (Chillida’s house): a stone wall as a generative element of Chillida-Leku

Abstract

Throughout his professional career, Eduardo Chillida has paid homage to many different personalities in the world of culture, at all times highlighting some aspect that he himself and the person in question shared. He paid tribute to Jorge Guillén through verse, which reads “Deep is the air”, to Calder, through a giant hanging sculpture and to Miró by speaking about concavity and convexity. I understand that in the work carried out on the Zabalaga farmhouse the sculptor succeeded in making his own house: ‘Chillida’s House’. The raw material is a typical traditional Basque house, a stone box with a wooden interior. The process consists of taking away elements instead of adding on, so that a void is created in the interior. And the result is a house that speaks of space, of light, of matter and above all, of limits.