Created in 1974, Estela yunque is a powerful exposition of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida’s exploration into interior space and the concept of the void in three-dimensional form. Combining concepts Chillida had developed in two earlier series of works – the Stelae (Steels) and the Yunques de sueño (Anvil of dreams), examples of which can be found countless museum collects ions including the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Peggy Guggenheim collects ion in Venice – the present sculpture stands out for its unique title and combination of two different materials: steel for the base and iron for the undulating and curving upper section. Having remained in the same private collects ion since it was acquired from Galerie Maeght in 1981, the present work is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite example that utterly encapsulates the tenets of space, density, and rhythm key to the artist’s oeuvre.

Within Estela yunque there is a dynamic tension between the weighty immobility of iron, and the implied movement of the curling beams that rise from it, playing on a balanced dynamic of opening and enclosing, introspection and extroversion: an embrace which succeeds in being simultaneously intimate and structurally elemental. Chillida commented on this sensation of tactile attraction and conjunction of forms within his work, stating that: “There is an occult communication between everything near” (E. Chillida cited in: Exh. Cat., Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute of Art, Chillida, 1979, p. 21). In its exquisite fusion of solid form and empty space, Estela yunque gathers together the concerns and nuanced visual vocabulary that dominated Chillida’s creative process and can be viewed as the product of a sculptor at the height of his creative powers.

Recognition came early to Chillida, with an exhibition at the prestigious Salon de Mai in 1949 after only one year of working as a sculptor, and never left him. But despite his success in France, in 1951 Chillida returned to his native Basque country to learn blacksmithing, where, thanks to the mines at the feet of the Pyrenees, iron working has a tradition dating back to 3,000 BC. Today, iron is the material for which Chillida’s work is most widely celebrated. According to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “Eduardo Chillida wanted to know muscular space without fat and heaviness. The world of iron is all muscles. Iron is the straight, the certain, the essential force” (G. Bachelard in: 'Le Cosmos du fer', Derrière le Miroir, no. 90-91, October-November 1956, n.p.). Estela yunque reveals Chillida’s masterful command of iron as a material of extraordinary creative potential, rendering an object of great beauty from a material more traditionally associated with the weight of industrial development, whilst serving as an elegant encapsulation of Chillida’s working practices and aesthetic theories.

Presented here on an intimate scale, Estela yunque reveals Chillida’s masterful yet delicate command of iron. Possessing an elegant upwards energy that is nonetheless anchored to the earth, works such as the present assert Chillida’s position in the pantheon of great twentieth-century sculptors alongside artistic forebears Julio Gonzalez and Alberto Giacometti, and contemporaries David Smith and Anthony Caro.