In 1947 he abandoned architecture for art, and the next year he moved to Paris, where he set up his first studio and began working in plaster and clay.

[2] In 1950 Chillida married Pilar Belzunce and later returned to the San Sebastián area, first to the nearby village of Hernani and in 1959 to the city of his birth, where he remained.

From 1954 until 1966, Chillida worked on a series entitled Anvil of Dreams, in which he used wood for the first time as a base from which the metal forms rise up in explosive rhythmic curves.

[2] Rather than turn over a maquette of a sculpture to fabricators, as many modern artists do, Chillida worked closely with the men in the foundry.

[7] From quite early on, Chillida's sculpture found public recognition, and, in 1954, he produced the four doors for the basilica of Arantzazu, where works by other leading Basque sculptors – Jorge Oteiza, Agustin Ibarrola and Nestor Basterretxea – were also being installed.

[4] By the early 1970s, his steel sculptures had been installed in front of the Unesco headquarters in Paris, the ThyssenKrupp building in Düsseldorf, and in a courtyard at the World Bank offices in Washington At their best his works, although massive and monumental, suggest movement and tension.

For example, the largest of his works in the United States, De Musica is an 81-ton steel sculpture featuring two pillars with arms that reach out but do not touch.

Chillida also conceived a distinguished oeuvre of etchings, lithographs and woodcuts since 1959, including illustrations for Jorge Guillen's Mas Alla (1973) and various other books.

The huge cubic cave, measuring 40 metres (131 ft) along each side, is to be dug from inside a mountain that has long been revered by the inhabitants of the dusty, barren island to the south of Lanzarote.

About 64,000 cubic metres of rock will be taken away from the mountain, which rises out of an arid landscape in the north of the island, to create what Chillida called his 'monument to tolerance'.

[9] In 2011 local authorities decided to go ahead with a project by Chillida inside Mount Tindaya on Fuerteventura despite concerns from environmentalists.

[10] Chillida exhibited his early work in 1949 in the Salon de Mai at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and the next year took part in "Les Mains Eblouies", a show of postwar art at the Galerie Maeght.

Major retrospectives of Chillida's graphic and sculptural work have since been mounted by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1979), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1980), Palacio de Miramar in San Sebastián (1992); and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1999) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1999).

One, Haizeen orrazia (The Comb of the Wind) a collaboration with Luis Peña Ganchegui, is installed on rocks rising from the Cantabrian Sea at La Concha bay in Sebastián.

[1] In the early 1980s Chillida and his wife bought a sixteenth century Basque farmhouse and surrounding land at Hernani near San Sebastián to establish a permanent place to display his work in a natural environment.

[15] In 2006, Chillida's classic 1961 sculpture, Rumor de Limites, more than doubled estimates to sell to a collector from the Iberian Peninsula for a record £2 million in London.