Bilbao,
More than a quarter of a century separates their births – Godofredo Ortega Muñoz was born in San Vicente de Alcántara, and Chillida was born in San Sebastián – but their careers would unite them for a long time: during the fifties, sixties and seventies. Although their aims and registers diverged greatly, as did their conceptual and technical developments, and the Extremadura native seemed to pay attention to the realist tradition and the Basque to a personal abstraction that would be a common trend, it is possible to find links in their respective works and that is the aim of the exhibition that the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is dedicating to them until October, within the framework of its programme BBKateakthrough which for two years more than sixty encounters have been organised between pieces by authors represented in the collections of the centre directed by Miguel Zugaza.
This exhibition is precisely what puts an end to BBKateakbringing together around twenty works in three rooms: five projects on paper and seven sculptures by Chillida (in materials such as granite, terracotta, alabaster, steel, stone and wood) and nine paintings by Ortega Muñoz, all of them compositions selected by the curator Javier González de Durana, who is the artistic coordinator of the Ortega Muñoz Foundation in Badajoz, to give rise to a subtle conversation between the legacy of these authors based on colours, lines, gestures and voids, a dialogue in which the meeting points are highlighted without obviously blurring the great deal that separates them.
Of those common areas The evocation of the land is part of this: of the open landscapes of Extremadura in the case of Godofredo, many of whose paintings are based on panoramic dispersion, and of a compact earth in Chillida’s sculpture, tending towards agglutination and condensation. In the latter’s drawings, which are quite a bit earlier than those presented here with respect to his sculptures, we will see white spaces gesturally occupied by ink strokes that seem to refer to low walls, paths or the borders between crops.
If the territories at the foot of the Ortega Muñoz mountains are divided into small plots by white fences, the alabasters that Chillida carved have chiseled grooves that generate sections that break and, in turn, lead to hidden spaces. Contemplating some of the Lanzarote landscapes of Godofredo and those alabasters, we will detect slopes in the ground, steps in a regular cadence, elementary gestures on the earth or on the stone that seem to refer to simple calligraphy but not for that reason easy to decipher.
In the terracottas of the Guipuzcoan and in the summers of Ortega Muñoz, the movement seems to repeat itself in open waves, in plots of curves and straight lines that seem to give rise to areas of a body; the masonry walls in the terraces will also be confronted, with whites and blacks intermingled, topographically suited to a hillside, with the strokes in Indian ink or the terrains sculpted by Chillida; we will perhaps be able to glimpse, in both, doors, foundations, archaeologies.
And on Ortega’s slopes, the progressive terracing germinates in undulating and repeated shadows, here linked to the superimposed inked and glued papers of Chillida, which suggest waves on which the light falls unevenly, as if it did so to the rhythm of that abrupt escalation. Equally correlated are the strata that in the painting of the Badajoz artist suggest clearings on the moor and the sculpted twists and turns of the Basque artist, stratigraphies of parallel lines that escalate the empty lands, and the drawings of the latter that seem to contain capillaries capable of channeling life. Both of them handled complex simplicity.
Eduardo Chillida – Godofredo Ortega Muñoz
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS OF BILBAO
Plaza Museum, 2
Bilbao
From June 25 to October 21, 2024
