Barcelona, Mural G-333, 1998

The work was produced at the studio of Hans Spinner – a German ceramicist highly regarded by Chillida – in Grasse, in the South of France, where the sculptor had made most of his ceramic pieces. After firing the plaques of refractory concrete that make up the mural at 1,300 degrees centigrade, Chillida painted them in copper rust and fired them again at 1,120 degrees. During this double-firing process the rust acquired a characteristic black colour and a texture half-way between sculpture and engraving. The way Chillida uses clay and other materials that can be fired does not correspond to the traditional concept of ceramics; it is more of an architectural essay.

Chillida’s mural for MACBA encapsulates the sculptor’s own language and his concept of abstraction. Simplicity is at the core of a way of understanding art that eliminates all the superfluous and rhetorical elements of the image. In Barcelona, Mural G-333, as in all of Chillida’s work, there is a modulation of space and a game of relations between the full and the void, a void that often becomes sign. The drawing in the mural follows the typology of the artist’s late work, in which the power of the dark graphic motif and the black chromatic delimitations reflect the artist’s concern with volume and its occupation of space. Octavio Paz, an expert on Chillida, said that whether the sculptor worked in clay, iron, wood, concrete, alabaster or any other material, ‘they all say the same thing: space’.