Orio. Sculpture, painting, architecture, poetry, cinema.

Oteiza's artistic and personal career was always shrouded in a mythical halo due to his visionary and turbulent character, and above all due to the fact that, in 1959, Oteiza unexpectedly announced his abandonment of sculpture; even more astonishing news if we consider that at that time he was at the zenith of his artistic career, with the recent award of the First Prize for Sculpture at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957, with exhibitions in different galleries in America and representation contracts in Germany and elsewhere.

Oteiza, from his first moments, had declared that he wanted to become the sculptor that he was not and, consequently, his entire career is nothing but a renunciation of himself and an appeal to who he wants to be, a putting into crisis and reconstruction permanent of one's own subjectivity, based on the idea that the final objective of art is not the work, painting or sculpture, but, rather, the elaboration of the artist himself as a person educated from art and willing to act directly in society.

Self-taught, Oteiza began by making sculptures within the orbit of expressionism or primitivism that began by Gaugin, Picasso or Derain, developed through Brancusi, Epstein and others. After a long stay in South America, the sculptor develops theoretically and practically the fundamentals of his aesthetics, and the "natural" sculptor within him is taking the necessary steps to become the artist who is somehow in control of his mechanisms. and tools.

At the end of the 1940s he returned to Spain. The massive and monolithic sculpture, with which Oteiza was naturally identified, undergoes a process of dematerialization, according to which the mass-statue must give way to the "trans-statue" or the energy statue of the future: a fundamentally spatial artifact and energetic. Oteiza, always attentive to the development of science, will compare this transformation of mass into energy with that developed by nuclear research. The ideas of fission and nuclear fusion will allow him to discard options, thus facing the idea of "fission" or breaking of a heavy mass that exemplifies the perforated sculpture of Henry Moore (whose work had strongly impacted him in the 1940s), Oteiza will propose a type of sculpture that is capable of releasing energy through the "fusion" or coupling of light units.

When, at the beginning of the fifties, he was immersed in an abstract investigation, Oteiza assumed the commission of the realization of the statuary of the new Basilica of Arantzazu. This project represented for Oteiza the opportunity to relate that notion of a new spirituality with aesthetic roots emanating from modern art, with a popular religious sentiment, and for this he renounced a strictly abstract type of expression for another, which even incorporating the spatial findings of the trans-statue, was able to connect with a group for which the figurative reference was essential. Despite this, Oteiza's work, begun in 1952, was banned by the church in 1954, and could not be completed until 1969.

From the moment of Arantzazu's prohibition, the sculptor will retake and specify his experimental Purpose, based precisely on the definition and articulation of these open or light units for spatial activation from an exhaustive use of emptiness and the negative. , and a fading of expression through the receptive and the still. This process, developed from hundreds of small models in very basic materials that will make up the so-called Experimental Laboratory, will gradually decant sculptures made, both in stone, and in constructions made from thin metal sheets arranged in "experimental families": Unemployment of the sphere, Opening of polyhedra, Empty constructions, Empty boxes, etc. The very internal logic of such a process of dematerialization and silencing of the sculpture implicitly carried the need for an end to said process, something that Oteiza reasoned in the form of experimental conclusions; some minimal and empty sculptures made in 1958-59, in which some, like the sculptor Richard Serra, have wanted to see a precedent of Minimalism.

Silence, the product of a language of absence and emptiness, must end in an absence and a void of language. Following his resignation from sculpture, Oteiza published his book Quousque Tandem !, in 1963, a text that summarizes many of the theoretical concerns that accompanied him throughout his life and artistic career since the 1930s, and which constituted the book of fundamental reference of the Basque cultural and political intelligence of the moment.

He then wrote Spiritual Exercises in a Tunnel, which was banned by Franco's censorship, not being published until the 1980s, although it was widely circulated in a photocopied version. Simultaneously, he began his experimentation within the field of cinematography with the film project Acteón for the producer X-films, although it was finally made by another director in a version very different from that conceived by Oteiza. It also initiates different projects such as the one sent to André Malraux (then Minister of Culture of the French Republic) for an Institute of Aesthetic Research for Euskadi Norte, a pilot children's university for Elorrio, a project for a Basque Aesthetic Anthropology Museum for Vitoria, art gallery as Producer, a project for the integration of avant-garde art with traditional forms of expression, the Groups of the Escuela Vaca, Escuela de Deva, etc. They were at the level of Oteiza's expectations.

Between 1972 and 1974, Oteiza decided to complete some of the series that had been left unfinished when he abandoned sculpture and developed his Chalk Laboratory. Some of his results, along with new materializations of previous sculpture models, were exhibited in 1974 at the Txantxangorri Gallery in Hondarribia. At the end of the seventies, he moved from Irún, where he had resided since 1958, to Alzuza, Navarra, where he continued his theoretical activity, at the same time that he resumed, in a very intense way, his poetry, which began in the days of the Arantzazu project with Androcanth and I continue. Ballet by the stones of the apostles on the road, and which continued with books such as God exists in the Northwest or Itziar. Elegy and other poems. The protean will of Oteiza, together with the continued frustration of his projects, created the image of a permanently angry character in the media, willing to unleash his fury on anyone who crossed his path, applying a special viciousness when it was a politician . This image contributed decisively to create the «Oteiza myth», to the point of obscuring, to a great extent, his sculpture. In 1988, the Caixa Foundation organized Oteiza's first anthological exhibition, Purpose Experimental, in Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona, which brought his sculptural work to the fore, and was invited to the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the consequent international repercussion. During these years, he received several awards such as the Medal of Fine Arts or the Prince of Asturias for the arts.

In 1996 Oteiza and the Government of Navarra ratified the agreement on the destination of his work within the Oteiza Museum Foundation. On April 9, 2003, Oteiza passed away in San Sebastián. Since then, different exhibitions of his work have been held, culminating in the one organized by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, at its headquarters and at the Frank Lloyd Wright building on 5th avenue in New York, as well as at the Museo Reina Sofia from Madrid. In 2007 his work was incorporated into the XII Documenta of Kassel as a valuable reference within the framework of the question Is Modernity our Antiquity ?. In recent years, the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation has carried out critical re-editions of his most important works as well as exhibitions and publications that investigate specific aspects of his sculptural work: the Bienal de Sao Paulo del 57, the Chapel for the Camino de Santiago , the Experimental Laboratory, among others.