Eduardo Chillida Sculptures

Isleworth Golf & Country Club in Windermere, Florida is hosting twelve large-scale sculptures by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Coming directly from the artist’s estate, each work was conceived for the outdoors and will be offered in a single-artist private selling exhibition through April 2011. The natural splendour of Isleworth provides the ideal venue to showcase the works of Chillida, who considered the natural surroundings to be integral and inextricable elements of his sculpture.

Chillida achieved international recognition in the late 1940s and early 1950s, thanks to his critically acclaimed exhibition at the May Salon in Paris and to the Grand Prize for Sculpture he received at the Venice Biennale in 1958. The artist rapidly gained a strong international following, and today Chillida’s works are on public display in cities worldwide, and are part of permanent collections in more than 40 museums in Europe, America, Asia and South America.

Following his formative years in Paris and the creation of his own sculptural language in plaster and stone, Chillida returned to his homeland in Spain’s Basque Country where he forged his first work in iron in 1951 at a local foundry. His preoccupation with form and space and his treatment of the material have transformed the field of sculpture and directly influenced many artists working today.

"A piece of iron is an idea in itself, a powerful and unyielding object. I must gain complete mastery over it, and force it to take on the tension which I feel within myself, evolving a theme from dynamism. Sometimes the iron refuses to give in. But when I eventually reach my goal, I always know: the individual fragments crystallize with a sudden shock and form a whole. Nothing can now separate the space from the force which encircles it."

Eduardo Chillida, quoted in Pierre Volboudt, Chillida, 1967