Artists
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Bios
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Jorge Oteiza Embil, one of the maximum representatives of the Spanish sculpture of the XXth century, was born in Orio (Guipuzcoa) on 21October 1908, in the bosom of a well-off family.
As a child, he was sensitive, introverted and easily scared. Between 1914 and 1920, he studied the baccalaureate in the School of the Sacred Heart of Donostia and, in 1921, he moved to study in Navarre, where his personality changed and became more extrovert and sociable. In these circumstances, he formed friendships with artists of the height of the painter Juan Cabanas and the musician Nicanor Zabaleta.
In 1927 he moved to Madrid and, although he started being interested in architecture, ended up by registering in medicine. One year later, he achieved his first sculptures and, in 1929, left that career to sign up to the School of Arts and Trades, after the subject of biochemistry was waking up his vocation for sculpture. In these years, he suffered a religious crisis, an approach to the political ideas of the left wing and the exacerbation of his conscience Basque identity. Economically it was not the best epoch of his life since, after the departure of his father and his eldest brother, he had to take charge of his mother and his five younger brothers, which he was employed at several places at the same time and ended up being fed thanks to charity.
In the '30's, he started frequenting the artistic life of Donostia, with some exhibitions and the participation in contests, like the Artists Noveles Guipuzcoanos, which he won in 1931.
In 1935 he went away to South America, together with his friend the painter Narkis de Balenciaga. For 15 years, he travelled round Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru; he was a teacher, he founded an experimental theater in Santiago of Chile, got soaked in the artistic movements of avant-garde as well as cubism and he even married.
In 1948 he returned to the Basque Country and settled in Bilbao. He tried to re-live through the artistic Basque impetus of the Republic but he only found disappointments. Meanwhile, he started experimenting with the hollow and the volume on his works and, two years later, he was awarded the statues of the new basilica of Aránzazu, in Guipuzcoa. His work, extremely heterodox and vanguard-like and, therefore, polemic, provoking that the Pontifical Commission to paralyse the execution of the pieces, but the project was resumed, in 1968 by order of the pope Pablo VI.
His international recognition came in 1957, when he received his first sculpture award from the Biennial one of São Paulo. In the decade of the '60's, he penetrated in to other facets, like poetry, architecture and philosophy.
In 1988, the Fundación La Caixa and the Museum of Fine arts of Bilbao organised a big retrospective exhibition of his work. During the '90's, he developed a public frantic activity, raising strong polemics in the Basque Country and in 1992 he donated all his artistic funds to the government of Navarre.
He died on 9 April 2003 in San Sebastian because of a long respiratory illness, a few days before the Museum Oteiza was inaugurated in Alzuza (next to Navarre).
In Barcelona, s. Antes, in 1994, rejected to make a sculpture for the city and he left his decision to scrutinize in the hard Ode to Barcelona.