Dialogues is a tribute to three of the greatest artists in contemporary sculpture: Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastian, 1924-2002) Jorge de Oteiza (Orio, 1908. San Sebastian, 2003) and Richard Serra (San Francisco, 1939). The exhibition takes the form of a dialogue between the three artists and of a dialogue with the environment and the Basque people.

After an initial period of friendship between Chillida and Oteiza, while they belonged to the GAUR group and while they contributed to the Basilica at Aranzazu in the 1950s, there was well-known disagreement between the two men. The resulting conflict lasted for more than 30 years but finally came to an end in 1997 with a reconciliation in front of Chillida's sculpture Besarkada (The Embrace). Their embrace was not only brought about by the weight of age, and their mutual, although silent, admiration of each other's work. They also had certain common traits which made them kings of their art. They were two vertices of a triangle formed by icons of sculpture. The third vertex, an admirer of both artists, was an American: Richard Serra.

Serra considered the Basque Country to be the part of the world with the greatest potential for sculpture, and for him the proof of that was the fact that two great figures such as Chillida and Oteiza existed there at the same time. Together, the three sculptors revolutionised 20th-century art and shared concepts that brought contemporary sculpture to a high point. They were three battling metallurgists, three conquerors of space, three architects of emptiness.

The outside square of the Museum welcomes visitors with one sculpture by each one of them: Elogio de la Arquitectura XIV (Eduardo Chillida, 1994), Frinkle Octagon (Richard Serra, 1991) and Mirador mirando (Jorge Oteiza, 1958). In all three the strength of the steel accentuates the architectonic nature of the works, conveying concepts such as space and the situational, volume and emptiness, and creating a dialogue between various opposed elements - weight and equilibrium, rhythm and gravity - with an effect that is as corporal as it is spiritual. All three display a totemic character of great volumetric power and express a clearly humanistic form of rationalism. The dialogue continues inside the Museum, where various metal sculptures invade the space, accompanied by a small selection of expressive wall pieces in the form of papers, canvasses and engravings.

Both outside and inside, these works invite the spectator to walk around them and make sculpture into an experience, transforming space into something almost tangible and making clear the interchange between emptiness and matter. This is a much-needed dialogue, in which phenomenology and ontology fuse and materialise in a new universe with new dimensions. It is an elegy to rusting and to forging.

Dialogues
South Gallery, from October 24, 2009.

Dialogues is a production of ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz).
Activities: inauguration (Friday, October 23, 8 PM); free guided visits