Alberto Giacometti

06 december 1988 - 26 february 1989

Curated by Rudi Fuchs, Johannes Gachnang and Cristina Mundici

 

During the 1940s and 1950s Abstraction became synonymous with the avant-garde from Europe to the US. Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, Switzerland, 1901–1966) practised a type of figurative art that, even within the context of the avant-garde’s hegemony, achieved very important results from both a formal and aesthetic point of view.

Giacometti’s human model – which, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is the expression and representation of a fragmentary, but eloquent human being – is the result of the artist’s long-standing research into the human figure, begun in 1934, the year he broke away from Surrealism. The artist appropriated the specific idioms of the art of his era and translated them into a language that took into account the work of at least three generations. Giacometti completed this process of synthesis in the late 1940s, when his vertical human figures start to break line and obey the dictates of the raw material itself. This transformation is already visible in a number of works of 1949, where his handling of matter and volumes anticipates subsequent works in which he lengthens the figure to the point that it barely has an outline.

In the 1950s the artist’s attention shifted towards the creation of human forms capable of integrating with nature and transcending space and time. This retrospective exhibition began with some of Giacometti’s earliest works, made while he was still part of the Surrealist circle, and went on to cover his activity up to the 1960s.

[D.G.]