Eduardo Chillida present shines a light-weight on lesser-known works impressed by summer season holidays in Menorca

Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) would have been 100 this 12 months. Born and raised in San Sebastián, he was a loyal Basque who, regardless of being essential of the separatist group Eta, grew to become a figurehead for the area; in his use of supplies, particularly iron, which had been used within the space for hundreds of years, he utilized Modernist concepts utilizing historic methods.

In his lifetime, Chillida arguably grew to become Spain’s most internationally recognised sculptor, a paradoxical achievement throughout Franco’s dictatorship, which had restricted sympathy for summary artwork. As political headwinds blew this fashion and that, and as his works have been interpreted as variously Basque, Spanish and internationalist, Chillida would say that “an individual, any individual, is extra precious than a flag, any flag”.

To commemorate his centenary, Hauser & Wirth Menorca is staging a significant show of Chillida’s monumental public works, in addition to sculptures, drawings, collages and prints. Alongside his relationship to the pure world, there will probably be an emphasis on Chillida’s humanist and even apolitical sensibilities.

Whereas persevering with to work day-after-day, along with his eight youngsters in tow, from 1989 Chillida took his household to Menorca in the course of the summers and it was there that his work took on a “lighter” high quality, says his grandson, Mikel Chillida. “The transfer from the heavier, darker environment of the Basque Nation, the place every little thing felt to be pushing down with such gravitational energy, to the Mediterranean, with its distinctive mild and joyous sense of uplift, reminded my grandfather of his earliest travels to Greece,” he says. The rugged panorama of Menorca, and particularly the Talayotic prehistoric settlements, helped to encourage the Lurra (earth) collection, chamotte clay items with deep grooves resembling keyholes that recommend hidden areas inside.

Conceived on Menorca’s Illa del Rei by the architect Luis Laplace, who helped rework the Chillida Leku, a former barn-studio and now the artist’s basis in San Sebastián, the exhibition seeks to reorientate our sense of Chillida away from the macho machinist right into a delicate lover of the pure world. However it’s his persona because the “goalkeeper-sculptor” that, for a lot of, continues to endure (his promising early footballing profession because the goalkeeper for Actual Sociedad was abruptly ended by a knee damage).

Mikel Chillida explains how soccer, in addition to artwork, allowed his grandfather to discover a approach of communing with the world: “‘The goalkeeper is the one one who’s taking a look at every little thing,’ my grandfather used to inform me … ‘there’s nothing behind him, besides the aim, which is the one three-dimensional object on the sector, and he’s the one controlling it … In artwork as in soccer, every little thing is time and house.’”

• Chillida in Menorca, Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Illa del Rei, 11 Might-27 October