Desocupación no cúbica del espacio

Jorge Oteiza created his first sculptures under the influence of primitive art, even though these already display the transcendental quality of the later work. From 1940, influenced to some extent by Henry Moore, Jorge Oteiza began to separate the members of his figurative sculptures and to create interstitial spaces in the pursuit of contrast between areas of light and zones of shadow. It was during this period that he broke away from the organicism of Moore and set out to create a new sculptural alphabet, abstract in character, in which he fused the interior space and the exterior, man and the universe, the real and the ideal.

Conjunción dinámica de dos pares de elementos curvos o livianos belongs to Oteiza’s mature period. Here, the sculptor explores the “spatial non-occupation” of a volume starting from a dynamic sense of the sphere, which in its essence revolves around itself or roman in constant rotation. Produced only a year before he gave up the practice of sculpture, Desocupación no cúbica del espacio forms part of the series devoted to Construcciones vacías and to Cajas metafísicas. For all their closeness to neoplasticist and suprematist practice, the processes employed by Oteiza in this work reveal one of the constants of his career: the desire to preserve the vital content of his works from pure logicism. In this way, in place of the analytical rigidity of mathematics the Basque sculptor turns to biology or physics, as sciences grounded in reality.

In 1959 Jorge Oteiza abandoned the practice of sculpture to devote himself entirely to the theory of art and the study of the Basque cultural identity; since then, he has become involved in fields as diverse as architecture, poetry and film.

of my Non-occupation of space

creation of gaps of empty spaces

in sculpture as experimental object

spatial non-occupation of the cube

of the sphere

and the cylinder

with a hug for Cézanne

. non-occupation of the polyhedron

. non-occupation of the city

in architecture in urbanism empty the city

to see the sky

in film concavity holes

in sport places outside of the world

in football

displace defences

open gaps

to escape.”

Jorge Oteiza, n/d