Chillida's Swiss Connection Pays Dividends

A large-scale sculpture in iron by Eduardo Chillida with a distinguished provenance soared at auction in Switzerland.

Ikaraundi (1967), which sold for $5.69m at Galerie Kornfeld in Bern on September 11, was first owned by Ida Chagall, the only child of artist Marc Chagall, and her husband, the Swiss curator Franz Meyer.

They knew Chillida personally and acquired the work in 1961, when Meyer was director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized a solo exhibition of the sculptor's work the following year.

There are four copies in iron of Ikaraundi, which is Basque for “great tremor,” and the original was first exhibited at the 1958 Venice Biennale. It was also displayed at the 1964 New York World's Fair.

The sale of a pivotal work by the Spanish-Basque sculptor, the subject of a major centenary show at the San Diego Museum of Art this year, exceeded his recent auction results and came close to the artist's auction record of $6.31m, set in 2013.