Galerie Maeght, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
Galería Barbie, Barcelona
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1977

Exhibition Catalogue, London, McRoberts and Tunnard Gallery, Chillida, 1965, p. 17, no. 4, illustration of another example
Claude Esteban, Chillida, Paris 1971, p. 72, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Fundacíon Santilla, Ministerio de Cultura, España. Medio siglo de Arte de Vanguardia 1939 – 1985. Vol. 1, 1985, p. 495, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Valencia, IVAM Institut Valenciá d’Art Modern, Eduardo Chillida: Elogio del Hierro,1988, pp.72-3, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux; Künzelsau, Kunsthalle Würth, Chillida, 2001, p. 80, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some very faint, light oxidation in small areas scattered intermittently to the underside. There is some minor wear to the patina on the extreme edges of the most protruding elements on both sides where the work has been alternately displayed.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Angular and rhythmically twisting in planes of solid metal, Hierros de temblor is a masterpiece from Eduardo Chillida’s early practice. Executed in 1957, this magnificent work denotes the very year in which Chillida returned to his native San Sebastian and crucially set up his metalworking forge amidst the rich legacy of blacksmithing native to the Basque region of Hernani. Combining the deepest roots of tradition marked by the stamp of modern industry with an utterly unprecedented spatial dialogue, the present work elegantly defies the heavy materiality of bronze. Embodying a prominent feature in major retrospective exhibitions of the artist’s career and with a fellow edition housed in the collection of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Fondazione Musei Civici in Venice, Hierros de Temblor is undoubtedly a standout work from this pivotal moment in Chillida’s oeuvre. Delivering an uncanny lightness that masterfully suspends sweeping geometric planarities in a lyrically rising kinetic tension, Hierros de Temblor represents a significant turning point in the trajectory of Chillida’s magnificent career.

In reaction against much of his training in Paris during the early 1950s, Chillida forged a sculptural practice entirely removed from figurative referentiality via a direct inquiry into the aesthetics of space itself. By 1957 this dialect had found the full force of mature expression. With a title that translates from Euskara as Trembling Iron and a formality that contours a vibrating and calligraphic linearity in solid metal, Hierros de Temblor powerfully epitomises Chillida’s burgeoning sculptural practice. Taking up a dialogue pioneered by the Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942), who laid the foundations for elevating the use of raw metal as a fine art material, Chillida’s work of mid-late 1950s is characterised by a physical and metaphysical dialogue with the forge itself. Alongside Hierros de Temblor (Trembling Iron), works such as Tximista (Lighting), 1957; Ikaraundi (Great Trembling), 1957; Yunques de sueños (Anvil of Dreams), 1958; and Rumor de limites (Mumur of Limits), 1958, directly communicate the alchemical poetics of fire, action and material in the dialect of Chillida’s own distinctly Basque sculptural calligraphy. As Kosme de Barañano outlines, “Chillida demonstrates that a sculpture also needs an internal fire to communicate a music of its own and to create its space… Chillida knows that space is created by action, and the action, by a dynamic force that constructs it. Sculpture is the print or trace” (Kosme de Barañano, ‘ Geometry and tatual: The Sculpture of Eduardo Chillida 1948-1998’, Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Chillida 1948-1998, 1999, p. 46). Hammered, wrought, carved and contorted from a single metal strip, the profusion of alternating angles and protruding struts elicits a harmonic reading that imparts a monumental yet lyrically abstract language for the silence of the void. The complex intertwining of contorted metal here bestows solid form to an energy lying dormant within ostensibly empty space.

Aligned with the artist's formative architectural training in Madrid during the mid 1940s, Chillida's emphatic inclination for industrial material and colossal three-dimensions readily channelled a dialectic sculptural attitude towards space and air – the real and essential fabric of Chillida's work. As explained by the artist: "Sculpture is a function of space. I don’t mean the space outside the form, which surrounds the volume and in which the forms live, but the space generated by the forms, which lives within them and which is more effective the more unnoticeably it acts. You could compare it to the breath that swells and contracts forms, that opens up their space ... to view. I do not see it as something abstract, but a reality as solid as the volume that envelopes it" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Chillida 1948-1998, 1999, p. 66). In his own distinctive sculptural hand-writing, Chillida draws an evocation of sonorous pauses and charged tremulous spacings akin to those of musical composition. Where Chillida composes with spatial emptiness and limit, the metre and rhythm of his sculptural scaffold analogously mirrors the musician as architect of time, sound, and most importantly silence. The interdispersion of harmonic spatial accents and dissonant inflections adroitly orchestrates silence and calls forth a charged communion between unbounded space and raw material: as Chillida once pointed out, "there is an occult communication between everything near" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute of Art, Chillida, 1979, p. 21).

Utterly evincing Chillida's archetypical call and response between positive and negative, density and weightlessness, geometry and organicism, the present work is a masterful embodiment of the artist’s sculptural dialectic between infinite space and sublime nature. With Hierros de Temblor, magnificently elegant abstract movements and twisting turns of a once planar metal slab represent the dexterous support lines that determine and generate space as the very conditions for Chillida’s sculpture.