When Eduardo Chillida wanted to immortalize his wife, Pilar “Pili” Belzunce, the Spanish sculptor did not design one of the larger-than-life iron, wood, and steel monuments set against the cyan open skies or crashing seas for which he had become known. He started with a small hunk of alabaster, and whittled it down from there. Homenaje a Pili (Homage to Pili) (2000) is waist-high at its tallest stretch, a soft hill in pale marbled-gray reduced to flattened planes and small curves—an ancient amphitheater with loosened sides. The material’s luminosity gives the boulder its delicate, ethereal quality, imbuing the emblem of his partner with a metaphysical glow; the surface’s pale veins draws the passerby into an intimate viewing.
Homage to Pili was cut from this particular stone because it mirrored the overcast horizon and shore of Chillida’s native Basque Country and Cantabrian Sea, the region the couple called home. He had often referred to the area’s natural wealth in his practice, trading the plaster he used in his Paris studio for the iron and wood of Basque industry and architecture. The rough coasts and rains were interpreted as they alloy he covered his steel beams, meant to rust over as they oxidized. Influenced by philosophies around notions of space by Martin Heidegger and Pablo Neruda; artists of his generation, including Brancusi; academic traditions from ancient Greece; and poetry and history, he became known for his outdoor site-specific monumental works fashioned into brutalist geometric swoops after lessons from a local blacksmith that were as substantial as the free space opened up by his cutouts.
Hauser & Wirth in Zurich now presents a series of the artist’s works made on the smaller scale—human sized works on paper and stone carvings for the interior from the past half-century. Works in steel, clay, and granite commingle with his engravings and Gravitaciones, intricate paper and felt collages in a shade of pale sand. These soft, ethereal works, often held together by a single thread, are in stark contrast with the presence of rusted steal beams overlooking the ocean, but, like Pili, manage to announce their presence without the burden.