Eduardo Chillida (Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, 1924 – 2002) was one of the leading Spanish sculptors of the twentieth century, but his true subject was never simply iron or granite: it was space itself. Trained in architecture at the University of Madrid before turning to sculpture in Paris in the late 1940s, he came to see his work as a sustained negotiation between mass and absence, between what a form encloses and what it leaves open. "My work is a rebellion against gravity," he once said.

This preoccupation with space drew Chillida into a real intellectual dialogue with the philosopher Martin Heidegger through the 1960s, culminating in Heidegger's 1969 text Die Kunst und der Raum (Art and Space), which Chillida illustrated with a suite of etchings. That graphic practice, prints, embossed paper, and drawing worked alongside the sculpture rather than after it, letting Chillida test in two dimensions what iron's resistance and alabaster's translucency could not: the cut, the fold, and the opening as marks in their own right, freed from the specific weight of any material.