This special display presents works by five artists placed in dialogue with the artworks, objects and spaces of the Kettle’s Yard House. The project is part of a multi-institutional exhibition taking place across Europe and the United States in 2021–22, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Ivorypress.
Upstairs in the Attic, you can find a group of works by the artist Eduardo Chillida.
Chillida (1924-2002) was born in San Sebastián in the Basque country, Northern Spain. Originally a student of architecture, he is best known for his monumental public sculptures, but his artistic practice also encompassed small-scale sculpture, plaster work, drawing, engraving and collage. Throughout his career, Chillida drew on his Spanish heritage combined with a fascination for organic form, as well as influences from European philosophy, poetry and history. Both his three-dimensional and two-dimensional works display a ‘dialogue between the full and empty’, and a fascination with the spaces between forms.
The works shown at Kettle’s Yard are a selection from Reflections (2002), the first artist’s book made by Ivorypress. Featuring 11 facsimiles of drawings and collages, Reflections takes a retrospective stance on the artist’s visual repertoire and conceptual grounding, with each work chosen by Chillida to represent a different point in his career from 1950 to 2000.
The six works are displayed in the Attic, a space usually reserved for works on paper by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, creating a dialogue between the two artists. Like Chillida, Gaudier-Brzeska was primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced an astonishing quantity of sketches and drawings during his short career. In both artists’ work, we can see a close relationship between sculpture and drawing, as well as an intuitive understanding of the material qualities of paper and ink.
