About
Art interests me greatly, but truth interests me infinitely more.
—Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figure’s mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that Giacometti’s depictions of humanity are “always mediating between nothingness and being,” his sculptures evoking the emotional intensity of the void. Often considered testimony to the ravages of postwar Europe, Giacometti’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings possess a timeless quality, inflected with art historical and philosophical narratives, from Surrealism and Expressionism to existentialism and phenomenology.
Born near Stampa, in Switzerland’s southeastern Alps, Giacometti grew up surrounded by the dark shadows, glistening lakes, and precipitous roads of the steep mountain range. This geographic intensity would deeply inform his understanding of mortality and time. In 1922 Giacometti moved to Paris, where, growing dissatisfied with his figurative sculptures, he turned to Cubism, dissecting abstract forms and experimenting with negative space. His search for noncorporeal sculptural forms led to planar, abstract works such as Gazing Head (1928), shown in an exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in June 1929. This work caught the attention of the Surrealists, whose thinking would influence the form and content of Giacometti’s work, and expanded the ways he approached themes of destruction, materiality, and the uncanny.
Giacometti often used his close companions as models, from his wife Annette to his brother Diego, as well as poets, writers, and fellow artists including Jean Genet and Eli Lotar, requiring them to sit for many hours—often over several weeks—to capture their likeness to his satisfaction. During these long periods of stillness, he would insist that his sitters offer him a presence as attentive as his own.
In the 1950s, beginning with his second exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, Giacometti started to gain international acclaim as critics, writers, and philosophers recognized his work as an absolute embodiment of his generation. During this period the artist was particularly focused on representations of the female nude, depicting slender, elegiac forms that emphasize the relationship between the body and gravity. Giacometti produced his famed Femmes de Venise (Women of Venice, 1956) for the French Pavilion of the 1956 Venice Biennale, as well as a concurrent retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern. Sculpting clay over wire armatures, he created around fifteen figures, nine of which were cast in bronze. Departing from his earlier, impossibly thin “visionary” figures, the Femmes de Venise are rendered with a lifelike accuracy, their somber elegance speaking to universal themes of life and death, darkness and light.
Up until his death in 1966, Giacometti pushed the limits of representation, setting into motion ever-unfolding phenomenological investigations that remain at the core of art making today: How can matter—bronze, plaster, charcoal, paint—embody truth? And how, if at all, can art preserve the essence of the living?
Photo: Gordon Parks/Getty Images
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Website
Exhibitions
Game Changer
Betty Parsons
Wyatt Allgeier pays homage to the renowned gallerist and artist Betty Parsons (1900–1982).
Peter Lindbergh on Alberto Giacometti
Peter Lindbergh discusses photography and the history of his practice with Catherine Grenier, Director of Fondation Giacometti. An accompanying video captures Lindbergh describing the powerful experience he had while photographing sculptures by Alberto Giacometti.
Substance and Shadow
Alberto Giacometti’s iconic sculptures have become the focus of Peter Lindbergh’s photographic gaze. An exhibition at Gagosian London brings together the sculptures and the photographs.
Alberto Giacometti and Yves Klein: Interview with Joachim Pissarro
Joachim Pissarro, the curator of Alberto Giacometti Yves Klein: In Search of the Absolute discusses with Gagosian’s Alison McDonald the works and themes that will be presented in this exhibition.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Visit
Musée & École Giacometti
The Fondation Giacometti is creating the Musée & École Giacometti in the historic building of the former Invalides train station and the basement of the esplanade in Paris, due to open in 2026. Envisioned as a new type of institution, the site will include a museum showcasing works by Alberto Giacometti, multidisciplinary exhibition spaces, and an art school. The site will be dedicated to fostering dialogues between the public, artists, and different modes of creative expression.
Invalides train station, Paris, to be converted into the Musée & École Giacometti. Photo: © Luc Castel, courtesy Fondation Giacometti
Art Fair
FIAC Online 2021
Printemps oublié
March 2–12, 2021
Gagosian is pleased to present Printemps oublié for the first online edition of FIAC. This curated presentation reflects the dual character of springtime as a reminder of past trials and the harbinger of a vibrant new season to come.
All the artworks will appear on the Gagosian website and a rotating selection will appear in the inaugural FIAC Online Viewing Rooms, from March 4 to 7.
Jeff Koons, Bluebird Planter, 2010–16 © Jeff Koons
Partnership
Douglas Gordon and
Institut Giacometti
The exhibition Douglas Gordon: The Morning After was scheduled to open at the Giacometti Institute in Paris on April 24, 2020, placing original works by Gordon side by side with those of Alberto Giacometti. Unfortunately, owing to the covid-19 crisis, the exhibition had to be delayed for a year. As a result, the institution has invited Douglas Gordon to collaborate on several activities from April 2020 through April 2021. This unprecedented partnership, the institute’s first with a contemporary artist, will variously take the form of impromptu interventions, disseminations, exchanges, and meetings on the foundation’s website and in the spaces of the institute and its partners.
Douglas Gordon’s hand alongside a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti at Institut Giacometti, Paris. Artwork © Succession Giacometti. Photo: Thomas Gangnet
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Affinità elettive
Picasso, Matisse, Klee e Giacometti
Through June 23, 2024
Gallerie dell’Accademia and Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice
www.gallerieaccademia.it
Affinità elettive, whose title translates to Elective Affinities, is held across two locations in Venice: Gallerie dell’Accademia and Casa dei Tre Oci, the European headquarters of the Berggruen Institute. More than forty works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, and Paul Cezanne, all from the collection of the Museum Berggruen in Berlin, are presented alongside Venetian paintings from the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The exhibition aims to explore the dialogue between these two different collections and the similarities in iconography and subject matter that arise.
Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar aux ongles verts, 1936, Museum Berggruen, Berlin © Succession Picasso 2024 by SIAE 2024. Photo: Jens Ziehe
On View
Giacometti / Sugimoto
En scène
Through June 23, 2024
Institut Giacometti, Paris
www.fondation-giacometti.fr
In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, invited Hiroshi Sugimoto to photograph their sculpture garden. This commission initiated the series Past Presence (2013–18), which includes photographs of Alberto Giacometti’s Tall Figure, III (1960) shot both in broad daylight and at dusk. The duality of these images evokes a connection Sugimoto saw between the sculpture and the supernatural aspects of traditional Japanese Noh theater, where the living and the dead meet on the stage. The exhibition, whose title translates to Staged, is organized around the reconstruction of a Noh scene and includes a selection of Giacometti’s most emblematic sculptures, photographs and films by Sugimoto, and ancient Noh masks from the latter artist’s collection.
Left: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Past Presence 070, Tall Figure III, Alberto Giacometti, 2016 © Hiroshi Sugimoto 2024 and © Succession Alberto Giacometti/ADAGP, Paris 2024. Right: Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche I, 1960, Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto Giacometti/ADAGP, Paris 2024
Closed
Alberto Giacometti
Le Nez
October 7, 2023–January 14, 2024
Institut Giacometti, Paris
www.fondation-giacometti.fr
This exhibition brings together all versions of Alberto Giacometti’s Le Nez (The Nose), a subject the artist revisited several times between 1947 and 1964. One iteration, which is too fragile to move, is presented virtually, introducing experimental media to the exhibition. The show also includes additional sculptures, drawings, and archival material, as well as works by four contemporary artists—Rui Chafes, Ange Leccia, Annette Messager, and Hiroshi Sugimoto—that respond to Giacometti’s practice.
Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez, 1947, Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto Giacometti/ADAGP, Paris, 2023
Closed
Escala: Escultura (1945–2000)
March 31–July 2, 2023
Fundación Juan March, Madrid
www.march.es
This exhibition, whose title translates to Scale: Sculpture, begins with a reflection on the effects of the Second World War on a number of artists and their conception of sculptural space as refuge. The role of scale in sculpture is examined, and in an echo of the expanded meaning of sculpture today, the exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls, into the gardens and the surrounding streets. Work by Chris Burden, Alberto Giacometti, Donald Judd, Henry Moore, and Richard Serra is included.
Chris Burden, Small Skyscraper (Quasi Legal Los Angeles County), 2002 © 2023 Chris Burden/Licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Brian Guido