Exhibition
The museum brings together works from the 1980s from the Telefónica Collection along with others from the Chillida Leku collections from the 1990s and 2000s.
The exhibition ‘100 Years of Eduardo Chillida with the Telefónica Collection’, which opens to the public at Chillida Leku on May 15th, is one of the major milestones in the commemoration of Eduardo Chillida’s centenary.
This significant exhibition brings together a selection of pieces that are part of Telefónica’s artistic heritage, a telecommunications and digital solutions company that led pioneering work in the field of corporate collecting during the 1980s and is also celebrating its own centenary in 2024.
The exhibition’s presentation at Chillida Leku was attended by His Majesty King Felipe VI; José María Álvarez-Pallete, president of Telefónica and its foundation; Luis Prendes, general director of Fundación Telefónica; Luis Chillida, president of the Eduardo Chillida – Pilar Belzunce Foundation; and Mireia Massagué, director of Chillida Leku.
The 1980s in Eduardo Chillida’s Career
‘100 Years of Eduardo Chillida with the Telefónica Collection’ aims to show how the 1980s were decisive in the artist’s career, a period in which he achieved monumental scale through public works and delved into new artistic concepts and projects in an intimate manner.
The year 1981 is marked by the death of gallery owner and representative Aimé Maeght, and although it signifies the end of a stage in the artist’s career, it also marks the beginning of a new one in which important retrospective exhibitions and the creation of large-format works coexist. Among them, La casa de Hokusai and Casa de Juan Sebastian Bach, both from 1981, stand out in the Telefónica Collection. This period also includes the production of Lurras and Gravitaciones.
These artistic advances are combined with other personal projects such as the discovery of the Zabalaga farmhouse in 1982, its purchase, and subsequent transformation. Undoubtedly, this opens a new path towards the realization of a dream that culminates in the creation of the Chillida Leku museum, his most intimate and personal project, on which he worked tirelessly alongside his wife, Pilar Belzunce.
The exhibition, which seeks to show the connections with Zabalaga and Chillida Leku, is part of the celebration of the centenary of the birth of an artist with roots in the Basque Country but with open arms to the world.
