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Jorge Oteiza (Orio 1908- San Sebastián 2003), is one of the most important Basque artists in Spanish 20th-century Art, as well as one of the most influential. The impact of his work in its various (plastic or theoretical) facets can be seen, from the 1950s to the present time, in disciplines such as sculpture, painting, architecture, poetry, aesthetics, cinema, anthropology, education or politics. Oteiza’s life and work were always shrouded in a mythical aura owing to his visionary troubled character, especially due to the fact that in 1959, Oteiza was to announce unexpectedly that he was abandoning sculpture; an announcement that was even more astonishing if we bear in mind that at that time he was at the height of his artistic career and had recently been awarded first prize for Sculpture at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1958, with exhibitions at various galleries in America, and contracts to display work in Germany and other countries. Nonetheless, if we bear in mind his personal idiosyncrasies and intricate aesthetic theories, this decision might not seem so shocking. Right from the very start Oteiza had claimed that he wanted to become the sculptor he wasn’t, and as a result, his entire career was merely a rejection of himself and an appeal to who he wanted to be, a radical questioning and permanent reconstruction of subjectivity itself, based on the idea that the final purpose of art is not the work, painting or sculpture, but the formation of the artist himself as someone trained through art and ready to act directly on society. A self-taught artist, Oteiza began making sculptures that fell within the field of the kind of expressionism or primitivism that was begun by Gaugin, Picasso or Derain, and developed through Brancusi, Epstein and others. After a long stay in South America, the sculptor gradually developed the theoretical and practical fundamentals of his aesthetic, and the “natural” sculptor that he had inside himself, took the steps he needed to become the artist that to a certain extent was in control of his mechanisms and tools. This intellectual adventure was to be reflected in texts like the Letter to the Artists of America or The aesthetic interpretation of American megalithic statues. In the late 1940s he came back to Spain. The huge monolithic sculpture that Oteiza naturally identified with underwent a dematerialisation process according to which the statue-mass had to make way for the “trans-statue” or energy-statue of the future: an a
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