Jorge Oteiza, two monuments: from space as place to space as shape

Abstract

In June 1959, two monumental ensembles by Jorge Oteiza comprising sculpture and architecture were presented to the public. Father Donosti Memorial, located at the alto de Agiña (Lesaka, Navarra) and inaugurated on the 20th, and its proposal for the first stage of the competition for the Monument to Jose Batlle y Ordonez in Montevideo, which was published (graphic documentation and memory) in that month’s number of the magazine Architecture from Madrid. That same month Oteiza published the article “Para un entendimiento del espacio religioso. El crómlech-estatua vasco y su revelación para el arte contemporáneo” (For an understanding of the religious space. The Basque cromlechstatue and its revelation for contemporary art) in the weekly newspaper El Bidasoa. In it he offered his aesthetic interpretation of the cromlech that was decisive to complete his experimentation with sculpture. The figure of the cromlech is present in the design of the two monuments, but while in the memorial of Agiña it is a physical, formal, historical and symbolic reference, as characterizing feature of the landscape in which this stands, in the project for Montevideo has become a conceptual tool, as well as a proof of transhistorical validity for the new art he was proposing: the spatial disoccupation.