DryStoneGarden

In Spain I visited Chillida Leku, the museum Eduardo Chillida developed to display his work. It’s great, a wonderful sculpture garden around a 16th century farmhouse and one of the best single-artist museum’s I’ve been to. Chillida is most famous for his work in steel, but he also did a lot of work in stone. The steel sculptures are great, but I’m mostly going to post photos of the stone and the farmhouse.

With stone, his biggest move is to have his fabricators carve geometric spaces into blocks of granite, making a kind of negative space sculpture. There’s an extended series called Lo Profundo del Aire carved in pink granite in which the negative space is the focus of the work. It’s good stuff, the carved out spaces resemble architectural interiors and the openings often feel like windows when you peer inside, but there’s also an interesting graphic quality when you step back to look at the block itself.

Anyone who likes these should check out Jorge Yazpik, who takes the negative space geometry even further than Chillida. I posted about Yazpik several years ago with photos of his basalt sculptures and his other work, really good stuff. I can’t think of anyone else doing work like this, but I would love to see more, so please comment or email me with any tips. It seems like there should be more of it in the world.

Chillida also has these interesting ones in which they carve false joints into the stone. I don’t remember with 100% confidence, but I think these are all formed by grooves carved from a single block rather than two blocks carved and fitted together. There’s a lovely graphic quality to them.

With this one, they carved down a block to give a three dimensional aspect to the grooves. It seems like an idea that would originate in clay, and it made the granite feel a bit like dough. It seems like lot of effort for a subtle effect, so maybe they were cleaning up a crack in the stone or a mistake by the carver. Anyways, I like it.

I love the renovated farmhouse.

Beautiful doorway.

Awesome posts and beams.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 at 12:31 am and is filed under sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.