EDUARDO CHILLIDA BELZUNCHE

Eduardo Chillida Belzunce was born in San Sebastián on March 15, 1964. Son of the sculptor Eduardo Chillida and Pilar Belzunce, he is the youngest of the family made up of the married couple and eight children, four boys and four girls.

From a very young age, Eduardo shows an interest in art. Thus, at the age of four, he made his first sculpture with earth that his father gave him. This small terracotta shows us a woman sitting on a chair with her arms behind her head and her legs crossed. More than the skill in making, what draws attention in sculpture is the plastic vision of the female body that Eduardo already had from a very young age.

In several of Chillida's drawings made for his son when he was a child, Edu always appears painting, either sitting or lying down, but with a pencil and paper in his hands.

It seems that his desire to "be an artist when he grows up" as he declared, was stronger than his desire to study. After a brief stint at the Deba School of Arts and the Círculo de Bellas Artes, where he had the pleasure of receiving classes from the painter Antonio López and also at the School of Arts and Crafts in Madrid, he began to dedicate himself first to sculpture and later also To painting.

In those years, he had not yet turned twenty, (between the ages of 17 and 20), he sculpts in stone, alabaster, and also works with terracotta and bronze.

He spends a season in his brother Pedro's studio. Pedro, who is the eldest of the Chillida boys and Eduardo's godfather, by then had studied Philosophy and Letters and had settled in a studio next to his father's house. There they both paint and chat and each one gives free rein to their own art.

In 1985 Eduardo has a terrible motorcycle accident that causes him to remain in a coma for a month and a half. Against all medical odds, Eduardo manages to get out of that dark tunnel, recover his speech, walk, and finally, with a lot of effort, return to normal life. Because of the paralysis on one side that he suffered after the accident, he is forced to become left-handed in order to continue painting.

It is then in 1986 when he moved to Madrid with his brother Luis to a student flat. A test to show yourself and others that you can function on your own. There he continues painting, but not sculpting. That is something that since the accident and for the moment he has stopped doing. From the looks of it, sculpture remains the furthest from his mind, though you never know what might be on an artist's mind.

The following year, 1987, he spent a period of six months in New York at his sister Susana's house. There, he liked to walk through Central Park and go to the Metropolitan Museum to see, as he himself says, his friends the painters. Of course, following his custom of always painting wherever he goes for more than a couple of days, he continued painting at Susana's house. He painted in one place and his brother-in-law Eduardo Iglesias wrote in another. Susana then began to prepare her doctoral thesis.

Back in San Sebastián in 1988, he held his first individual exhibition at Galería Deciseis in San Sebastián.

In 1990 he met Susana Alvarez, a journalist who works in advertising, and in September 1991 they got married in Amasa, a Gipuzkoan town near San Sebastián. Eduardo and Susana have four children, Eduardo born in 1993, Laura in 1995, Pablo in 1998 and Miguel born in 2004. In addition to the family they also share work, since his wife is dedicated to organizing Eduardo's exhibitions and accompanying him throughout his life.

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