Chillida started to experiment with printing techniques at the end of the fifties. His first works were etchings that took over the paper: “In a line the world is united, with a line the world is divided, drawing is beautiful and tremendous.” At the end of the sixties he began to introduce aquatints, which create dense blotches that brought to mind his sculptures.

For Chillida, both printing and sculpture were means to study the effects of light, contrast, darkness and clarity, emptiness and fullness. In fact, the poetics of opposites was a constant running throughout his whole body of work.

In this lithograph edited by Maeght in Paris, unlike the graphic work which he would produce at the end of the seventies, he dispensed with the black and white duality so characteristic of his work and instead he seemed to recreate, through the use of colour and light, almost a rough texture as if it were a sculpture. The underlying spatial conception can be perceived, with the stains of colour addressed as if they were layered paper cut-outs simulating a of irregular pieces.