In the DKM Museum, a themed room is dedicated to the motive of the hand, which has always been the focus of many visual artists. The Krämer Maas Collection houses numerous works on paper by the basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastián, ES 1924 – 2002) that revolve around this pictorial theme.

In the more than five decades of his artistic career, between 1945 and 2000, Eduardo Chillida, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, created over 300 drawings, collages, etchings, steel sculptures and terracottas, all based on the same motive: the hand. Although the hand is a constant in Chillida’s work, the more intimate works on paper are an unknown quantity in his oeuvre. However, they illustrate formal and spatial characteristics of his sculptural work. In his hands, Chillida finds a living element that allows him to explore space, to grasp it in the truest sense of the word. The hand serves him as a sculptural component to organise line, mass, emptiness and volume and to question space. Sometimes it is open, sometimes closed, sometimes inside or outside, sometimes motionless and sometimes in action.

The power of the line develops a multitude of variations, whereby the rhythm, contour, movement and opening of the line create an astonishing plasticity. Chillida’s hands, like his sculptures, observe and construct the whole magnetism of the play between space and emptiness.

One of Eduardo Chillida’s works on paper, which is part of the Krämer Maas Collection, was purchased at auction in poor condition. Last year, it was examined and restored as part of a bachelor’s thesis in the Written Material, Graphics, Photography and Book Illumination degree programme at the Institute for Restoration and Conservation Science at Cologne University of Applied Sciences. We would like to thank Anne-Lena Krahe for her work and are delighted that a further drawing by Chillida will soon be added to the themed room.

Further information on the study project can be found on the following website:

https://www.th-koeln.de/kulturwissenschaften/cics—studienprojekt—abloesen-einer-zeitgenoessischen-grafik_106951.php

Laura Tammen, 2024