A controversial sculptor and undeniable figure in contemporary art, Jorge Oteiza has been the creator of spaces whose work covers the main preoccupations of the avant-garde, showing great interest in archaic and primitive forms and an obsession with reductivist geometry, as is present in movements such as cubism, constructivism and minimalism.
He was born in Orio, Guipúzcoa, in October 1908, and studied in Madrid, three years of Medicine and three months in an Arts and Crafts College.
In 1931 he won the first prize in Sculpture in the Biennial of Guipuzcoan Artists in San Sebastián, the city where he would open his first individual show in 1934.
In his first period, interested in the work and the person of the sculptor Alberto Sánchez and attracted by those who were putting rationalism into practice in architecture, he was in conflict both with the conventional art then encouraged in the Basque Country and with the Surrealism which was drawing in many of his companions in Madrid.
In 1935 he moved to Latin America: he showed in Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires, and taught in the Argentine National School of Ceramics. In 1942 the Colombian government commissioned him to organise the official teaching of ceramics in Bogota. two years later, he published his 'Carta a los artistas de América', on new, post-war art, and in 1948 he published his 'Informe sobre mi escultura' in Buenos Aires.
During these years, Oteiza had structural problems with a series of figurative sculptures. These were years of a precarious, unstable existence which had greater influence on his intellectual and political formation than on his artistic work.
In 1948 he returned to Bilbao and began the most intense period of his life as a sculptor. In the mid-fifties, moreover, a movement of artistic renewal was to arise in Spain, which would give sculpture a previously-unknown importance, to which Oteiza would contribute in an outstanding manner.
In 1951, after winning first prize in the national competition to raise a monument to King Philip IV in San Sebastián, he was given the commission for the sculptures for the new basilica of Aránzazu, in Guipúzcoa.
He won first prize in the IX Triennial of Milan and remained immersed in intense research work which was to be interrupted in 1957 when he was selected for the IV Biennial of Sao Paulo, where he won the International Grand Prix in Sculpture. In 1957 he also set up the Spanish Pavilion at the International Fair in Brussels.
In 1959 he declared that his experimental and professional life as a sculptor was over. Minimal formal elements have allowed him, not to delimit spaces, but to create vacuums. He stopped being a sculptor, but not making sculptures, and carried on intense political, social and cultural work through his poems and aesthetic, linguistic and anthropological studies.
In 1970, he won first prize in the contest of proposals for the urban development in the Plaza de Colón in Madrid, and in 1985 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fine Arts.
He has published, among other writings: 'Ensayo de interpretación estética del alma vasca' (1963), 'Un modelo de hombre para el niño de cada país' (1972) and 'Existe Dios al Noroeste' (1990).

Jorge Oteiza died in San Sebastian on April 9, 2003 when he was 94 years old.