The House-workshop

The visit to Jorge Oteiza’s Home-Studio extends the discourse of the exposition in the Oteiza Museum to a essential setting in the artist’s biography. Jorge Oteiza and his wife Itziar Carreño settled in this abandoned house in Alzuza in 1975 and made it their home, work centre and refuge. Alzuza became the setting for the artist’s proclaimed desire to get away from it all, where he found the isolation he needed to focus on his poetry, essays and research, although it also proved to be a meeting point for the intellectual community that kept in touch with Oteiza.

This space provides an approach to the artist’s creative personality through a display of thematic, geographical and audiovisual units that help to reconstruct the artist’s life and creative career. The various areas of the Home-studio are arranged in accordance with new data and documents that provide evidence of the scenarios and creative disciplines in which Jorge Oteiza worked. These also offer certain keys that provide access to the artist’s creative output and life, and give us a cartographic vision of his personality and creative declarations.

Among the items on display, it is worth mentioning the numerous graphic and written documents that have never been seen before, some models of his architectural projects, sculptures, studies from his chalk laboratory and other objects by the artist. The current spaces and collections are currently structured according to two basic guidelines, one that is geographical and the other is thematic.

The section governed by the geographical guideline contains numerous pictures of Oteiza’s life together with texts that explain different periods in the artist’s life.

The thematic guideline that governs how the materials on display are arranged shows various units connected with the numerous artistic and cultural projects carried out by the artist that refer to his relationship with architecture, his studies on pre-Indo-European Basque, his poetic activity, his links to cinema, the aesthetic problems raised in his texts and books, the social and cultural activity he carried out throughout his life, or his links to the Basque School of avant-garde groups. Each of these sections is accompanied by numerous documents that reflect and illustrate Oteiza’s thinking on matters dealt with in each of these units.