Authors

Home / Collection / Authors

Fr. Antonio Oteiza

Antonio Oteiza was much more than a sculptor, painter and religious man. He was a tireless traveller, a passionate observer of human nature and an artist who found in art a way to express what words cannot always convey. His work, deeply rooted in experience, spirituality and encounters with other cultures, preserves the vitality of a life lived with curiosity, freedom and emotion.

Art as a Form of Encounter

Antonio Oteiza Embil (San Sebastián, 1926 – Madrid, 2025) was a sculptor, painter, writer, Capuchin friar, missionary and traveller. Yet any one of these words, taken on its own, is insufficient to explain a life in which creativity, spirituality and human experience ultimately became one.

He was born in San Sebastián on 26 June 1926, into a family in which art would have an exceptional presence. His brother Jorge Oteiza, eighteen years his senior, would become one of the key figures in twentieth-century Spanish sculpture. Antonio, however, would follow a deeply personal path. At the age of ten, he moved to Orio, and in 1945 he entered the Capuchin novitiate in Bilbao. He studied Philosophy and Theology and was ordained a priest in Madrid in 1953.

Soon afterwards came the experience that would decisively shape his way of seeing: America.

He was sent to Cuba as a missionary and later lived and travelled in Venezuela and other parts of the continent. He journeyed along the Orinoco, lived among indigenous communities and discovered ways of life in which nature, fraternity, hardship and a sense of community were intimately intertwined. Those years were not simply a stage preceding his dedication to art. To a great extent, they were the place where his art was born.

Oteiza himself recalled that his inclination towards sculpture arose from a specific need. In Venezuela, he wanted to create a monument commemorating the Capuchin presence in those lands. He looked for a sculptor and, unable to find one, searched for clay and decided to make it himself. He was around thirty years old.

That gesture reveals something essential about his personality: “before it was a profession, for Antonio Oteiza art was a need for expression.”

“Art grows more from the blood than from reason”
— Antonio Oteiza

He returned to Madrid in 1961 and asked his superiors about the possibility of devoting himself to religious art. He trained with the sculptor Víctor de los Ríos and the painter Amadeo Roca, set up a small studio in the Capuchin monastery of Cuatro Caminos and began a period of exploration that would gradually lead him from academically rooted figurative art towards an increasingly personal, expressive and essential language.

He worked in wood, stone and ceramics. He also studied at the International School in Perugia, Italy, and during those years participated in the renewal of religious art that accompanied the Second Vatican Council. His religious imagery would not simply repeat inherited models. Oteiza sought to make matter itself capable of conveying emotion, restlessness, pain, tenderness and spirituality.

In 1969, he experienced a unique episode in his career: for a time, he worked at Arantzazu alongside his brother Jorge on the Basilica’s extraordinary artistic project. It was the only occasion on which the two brothers worked together. Their closeness did not erase their profound creative differences. Antonio explained this with particular clarity: while Jorge had constructed an intensely reasoned and theorised form of art, he himself felt drawn to the spontaneity and freshness of folk art.

And he travelled again.

In 1970, he left for Brazil and spent months travelling up the Amazon. He later lived in the Peruvian Andes, served as parish priest in Angasmarca and continued exploring different lands and cultures. These experiences also gave rise to books and travel notebooks. Antonio often described himself as an adventurer, perhaps because he never wanted to separate artistic creation entirely from the experience of living.

His travels transformed his way of seeing. In contrast to an exclusively intellectual conception of art, Oteiza found inspiration among indigenous peoples, in popular cultures, in the simplicity of their objects and in the natural way in which communities continued to regard creation as part of life itself.

His sculpture thus acquired an extraordinary narrative power. Human figures, religious scenes, pilgrims, saints, workers, musicians, biblical characters and everyday events are infused with powerful gestures. His works contain bodies that seem to speak, walk, suffer, pray, embrace one another or question the viewer.

The religious dimension occupies a fundamental place in his work, but reducing it to the simple category of “sacred art” would diminish its richness. In Antonio Oteiza's work, the spiritual is continually bound to the human. His Christ also embodies suffering; his pilgrims also express weariness and searching; his Franciscan figures speak of fraternity, poverty and encounter.

He himself maintained that beauty could become a path towards truth and goodness. And this idea helps us understand much of his journey: to make visible what words cannot always express.

Antonio Oteiza died in Madrid on 4 August 2025, just a few weeks after his 99th birthday. He left behind almost a century of life shaped by faith, travel, adventure, creativity and a curiosity that seemed to remain with him until the very end.

Today, his work stands as the testimony of an artist who is difficult to confine within any one school. A creator who learned in studios and academies, but also in the Amazon, in the Andes, in the missions, along the roads and, above all, by observing people.

At the Museum, his sculptures and paintings offer a journey through precisely this universe. They speak not only of an artist's career.

“They speak of a man who travelled the world seeking to understand it and who found in art one of the most profound ways of telling its story.”