This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, Hernani, under number 1989.012 and accompanied by a cꦡertificate of authenticity

Executed in 1989, Locmariaquer IV belongs to an important series of sculptures created by Eduardo Chillida in 1989 and first exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in December that year. Chillida’s first American solo show since the acclaimed retrospective of his work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum a decade earlier, Chillida in New York was a landmark exhibition within the artist’s mature oeuvre. Another sculpture from the series, Locmariaquer IX, is in the Museo Chillida Leku.

Fascinated by mathematics and the physical sciences, Chillida conceived of the present series as a homage to René Thom, the Fields’ medal winner in mathematics, the founder of the so-called Theory of Catastrophes and a longstanding admirer of Chillida’s work. The artist’s interest in scientific theory acquires significance when we consider his visual approach to his experience and understanding of nature, as demonstrated in the present work. Chillida once declared that he used “weight in his sculpture in order to rebel against Newton” (the artist cited in Stefano Grillo, ‘A Weighty Issue: Chillida’s Scuptures’ in Nature, vol. 428, 18 March 2004, p. 259). In Locmariaquer IV, Chillida’s rebellion against Newtonian physics manifests itself in the sculpture’s palpable weightlessness. Despite the roughness and tensile strength of his c😼hosen medium, in Chillida’s hands the heavy steel is deftly dematerialised, appearing malleable and pliable, as if the sculpture were moulded with clay or wax. By staying loyal to the original material and understanding – as well as respecting – its nature, Chillida accentuates the softness found in the organic forms of our natural environment, thereby eliminating the often encountered dichotomy between the manmade forms of industry and the elemental forms of nature.

Importantly, the Locmariaquer series takes its name from the eponymous French town on the south coast of Brittany, famous for its complex of numerous megalithic sites and stone burial chambers, known as dolmen, erected as early as 2000BC. These tombs, which predate the pyramids in Egypt by a thousand years, consist of cavernous sepulchres constructed of upright stones capped by heavy horizontal lintels. Chillida witnessed the caves on a visit to the site when he was looking for a site to place a monumental sculpture. While there, Chillida purchased a hammer head which he employed to make the Locmariaquer series. Just like the cave-like interiors which inspire it, in the present work there is a dramatic tension created between the weight of the material and the weightlessness of the void that it inters. It explores the relationship between emptiness and construct, form and void, maintaining a constant dialogue between support and collapse, protection and exposure, tenderness and violence. As Michael Brenson said in his contemporaneous review of the Sidney Janis show: “Throughout his exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, it is the sculptural object and the volume inside it that holds space, orients it - creates it. It is the individual object and the life within it, not the environment, that matters most.” (Michael Brenson, ‘From Chillida: Pillars of Energy and Gravity’ in New York Times, 1^st December 1989).

A complex and lyrical work, Locmariaquer IV demonstrates the intelligent breadth and range of Chillida’s art. On the one hand looking back with an almost atavistic interest to the civilisations that were our ancestors, on the other it evinces his understanding of the scientific theories that explain our presence on earth. The common theme throughout is the embrace of nature, geology and truth to materials. As Brenson said when the sculpture was exhibited: “When Chillida is most successful, his sculpture alw🔥ays seems part of nature”. (Ibid)