Madrid once again welcomes the work of Eduardo Chillida. Twenty-five years after the great retrospective at the Reina Sofía, the city is premiering Eduardo Chillida. Dreaming Space, an exhibition of 120 works that transforms the Conde Duque Cultural Center into a living laboratory for the Spanish sculptor. The exhibition opens on Tuesday , February 17, and will be open to visitors until June 21, establishing itself as one of the major cultural events of the Madrid season.
Eduardo Chillida. Dreaming Space is the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to the artist in the capital since 1998-1999, when the Reina Sofía Museum devoted a retrospective to him that became a benchmark. This gap of more than a quarter of a century explains the anticipation: for an entire generation of visitors, it is literally the first opportunity to see a large collection of works by the creator of the Peine del Viento without leaving Madrid. The exhibition comes at a time when 20th-century sculpture is being revisited with fresh eyes, opening the door to new interpretations of his work.
Conde Duque transformed into a sculptural landscape
Eduardo Chillida next to Peine del Viento XV || Editorial credit: Eduardo Chillida Archive
The exhibition brings together around 120 pieces, including sculptures and works on paper, arranged as a journey through Chillida’s formal universe: wrought iron, steel, alabaster, chamotte clay, paper, ink… very different materials united by the same obsession with space, emptiness, and light. The drawings and engravings allow us to see how the idea is constructed before it becomes volume, while the sculptures occupy the room as silent presences that open up, fold or take root in the ground.
The layout of Dreaming Space is designed so that visitors not only contemplate the pieces, but also walk through them and inhabit them. Each work alters the perception of the room, suggesting routes, forcing visitors to walk around it, peer into its hollows or move away to capture the tension between mass and emptiness. In a building with as much personality as Conde Duque, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between the vaults, walls, and sculptures, so that the architecture becomes an active part of the exhibition’s discourse. Seeing Chillida in this urban context, far from the maritime landscape with which he is usually associated, is also a way of rediscovering him.