20th-21st Century Spanish

Gonzalo Chillida was born in San Sebastian on 12 January 1926. Still very young, he developed a passion for art, though unlike his brother, the sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), he opted for painting. In 1947 the artist enrolled at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, a training he completed by regularly attending the Círculo de Bellas Artes. He left Madrid in 1953, where he had been living since 1951, to settle in Paris. There he furthered his education at the Colegio de España. In that early period, he favoured a naturalist, still figurative style of painting. However, he gradually started to experiment with geometric forms, orienting his work towards with a series of landscapes from which he supressed all human trace little by little.

After those experiences the artist settled definitively in San Sebastian, where he held his first solo exhibition, Entre puntas, in the City Hall. San Sebastian was crucial for the body of work he developed in that period, for the foggy view of La Concha beach was a major inspiration for the dreamlike images in which he began to work after returning to the Basque Country. In the late 1960s, Chillida turned to abstraction. It was then when he created a more intimate and personal body of work with paintings evoking dreamlike landscapes somewhere between figuration and abstraction, in which nature, and very particularly the sea, the sky, sand and the horizon, were his main source of inspiration.

The 1980s was a particularly fertile decade for him: he took part in the group exhibition La trama del arte vasco, held at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao; in 1985 he obtained a Mention of Honour from the jury of the 1st Painting Biennial in San Sebastian, and was one of the artists selected to take part in the exhibition Pintura vasca contemporánea 1910-1985.

In 1990 the Museo de Bellas Artes of Bilbao organised a retrospective of his work, titled Arenas, paying tribute to his life’s work. In 2001 he was awarded the Gold Medal in Fine Arts.

Works by Gonzalo Chillida may be found in major institutions, including: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville; Fundación Juan March, Madrid; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia; Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca; and Museo de San Telmo, San Sebastian.