"Eduardo Chillida. Gravitation" opens its doors at the Kunsthalle Krems

The Kunsthalle Krems museum has been inaugurated by Eduardo Chillida. Gravitation, the first monographic exhibition of the Basque artist in Austria. The exhibition can be visited until September 24 and constitutes the first proposal for the celebration of Eduardo Chillida 100 years, title that has been given to the commemoration of the centenary of his birth, which will be celebrated next January 10 2024.

Chillida, one of the most prominent Spanish artists of the 20th century, lands in Krems with a total of 80 graphic and sculptural pieces that allow us to review his creative trajectory and convey to the viewer his explorations of the relationship between opposing concepts such as emptiness and volume, limit and infinity or light and shadow. This retrospective dedicated to the artist represents the artistic creations made throughout his career.

"Eduardo Chillida. Gravitation is the first international proposal of the centenary and allows us to show his work in a monographic exhibition, the first to be held in Austria", says Luis Chillida, son of the sculptor and president of the Eduardo Chillida Foundation - Pilar Belzunce. Eduardo Chillida's work - he continues - always had a universal vocation and for us it is essential to count on the complicity of institutions such as the Kunsthalle Krems, to spread his figure, both from an artistic and human perspective, to different countries and to the new generations".

The exhibition offers a tour through the diversity of techniques and materials used by the artist. Collect from pieces on paper and engraving to those created with plaster, iron, copper oxide or granite. His graphic works play an important role in this retrospective. In addition to drawings, collages and relief prints, the exhibition, as its name explains, pays special attention to Chillida's Gravitations, his famous creations on paper from the 1980s. These pieces, with which the artist plays with the concept of "gravity" taken to the limit, constitute the general focus of the exhibition.

The selection of works includes one of the drawings that the artist did on the occasion of the 1982 World Cup and which, in part, is the seed of this exhibition. "I have always wanted to exhibit the art of Eduardo Chillida", explains Florian Steininger, artistic director of Kunsthalle Krems Museum, "my first contact with his work was a sticker in a football album, which was based on one of drawings by the Basque artist for the 1982 World Cup". Steininger had to wait a few more years to continue discovering his work in the Gottlicher Gallery in Krems/Stein, very close to the museum. "I fell in love with his graphic and sculptural work full of poetry, concreteness and earthiness. I am delighted to start the celebration of Eduardo Chillida's centenary with the artist's first exhibition in an Austrian museum", concludes Steininger.

The artist's well-known monumental sculptures, located in the public spaces of cities around the world, are also present in the exhibition through sketches, models and photographs of some of the most emblematic, such as Peine del Viento, Homenaje a la architecture or Jaula de libertad. These sculptural works condense concerns about space, scale and architecture, while also referencing universal values such as tolerance or freedom.