March 31, 2014

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY HONG KONG




ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY HONG KONG
13 March 2014 - 31 May 2014




ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY HONG KONG
13 March 2014 - 31 May 2014
Oh! the desire to do pictures of Paris, a little everywhere, there where life has led me, or would leave me, the only way for all this my lithograph crayon, not painting or drawing, just this crayon for capturing on the spot, with no chance of ever erasing or revising, my first impressions.
Alberto Giacometti
Gagosian Hong Kong is pleased to present Alberto Giacometti's complete suite of lithographs Paris sans fin (Paris without end) together with key sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, and archival material from the same period, shedding new light on the creation of one of the major artist's books of the twentieth century.
From the 1930s until his death in 1966, Giacometti continuously investigated the possibilities of accurately representing what he saw before him. “Giacometti: Without End” celebrates his favorite city and people in 150 lithographs with text, produced for a diaristic artist’s book between 1959 and 1965. The initial maquette, as well as rare lithographs and drawings intended for the book, are exhibited here for the first time. Also on view are several important bronze sculptures, including Diego (tête au col roulé) (c. 1954) and Annette assise (petite) (1956); and paintings such as Caroline (1965). Original manuscripts and a selection of photographic portraits
by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eli Lotar, Jack Nisberg, and others provide a contextual backdrop for this book project that occupied Giacometti for nearly six years.
Giacometti’s major undertaking was spurred and encouraged by the publisher Tériade, a close friend and supporter from the time he singled the artist out thirty years earlier in his role as art critic. Just prior to this, Tériade produced Fernand Léger's La Ville, a book of lithographs that also took the city as its subject. Unlike Léger’s urban labyrinths, Giacometti’s impressions are a shorthand visual account of his daily life—in the studio and in cafés, on the grands boulevards, at the printer Mourlot’s new shop—that demonstrate his unassuming virtuosity. As Mourlot
recalled, the range of grey tones that imbue these illustrations with the foggy haze of the city is itself a technical feat.
As in his previous lithographic work, Giacometti did not draw directly onto limestone, as is the traditional method, but onto thin sheets of transfer paper, allowing for easier portability and a more accurate reproduction of the original drawing. He characterized the series as “images and memories of images,” an apt description of the volatile, fleeting scenes: intersections jammed with cars are depicted alongside crisscrossing electric cables and elevated railways; historic buildings surrounded by these symbols of change are rendered in nearly flat perspective.
Giacometti’s immediate approach treats a grand montage of models and unfinished works in the solitude of the studio; friends and family in motion; the towers of Saint Sulpice; and the Boulevard Montparnasse, where he frequented the Dome and Sélect brasseries. This grayscale conflation of past and present, old and new, is reflected in his contemplative notes, written to accompany the drawings in the twilight of his life:
‘’ The silence, I’m alone here, outside there’s the night, everything is still and sleep is
starting to return. I don’t know who I am nor what I’m doing nor what I want, I don’t
know if I’m old or young, maybe I’ve got hundreds of thousands of years to live, my past is disappearing into a grey abyss... ‘’
The exhibition, curated by Veronique Wiesinger, is accompanied by a fully illustrated book and has been organized in collaboration with Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris.
Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland in 1901 and died in Chur, Switzerland in 1966. Public collections include Kunsthaus Zürich; Tate Gallery, London; MUMOK, Vienna; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Selected recent exhibitions include Kunsthaus Zürich (2001); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2001); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2007–08); Kunsthal Rotterdam (2008); Pushkin Museum, Moscow (2008); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2009); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2010, traveled to
Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, through 2011); and Musée de Grenoble (2013). “Giacometti. La scultura” will be on view at Galleria Borghese, Rome, through May 25, 2014. Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti was established in 2003 to promote and preserve the artist’s work.

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/giacometti--march-13-2014




" GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END "
Installation view
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York




ANNETTE IV








" GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END "
Installation view
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York




















STAMPA 1961 BY HENRI CARTIER BRESSON








UNTITLED (MAN AT CAFE TABLE ), PLATE 90 IN THE BOOK PARIS 
© Courtesy of Legion of Honor










" GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END "
Installation view
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York




INTERIOR 1946




FEMME DEBOUT - C. 1961
Bronze ( 45.4 x 8.1 x 11.2 cm ) Ed. of 8, cast in 1993
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York




FEMME DEBOUT - C. 1961
Bronze ( 45.4 x 8.1 x 11.2 cm ) Ed. of 8, cast in 1993
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York








TALL FIGURE III ( LEFT ) & TALL FIGURE II - 1960 




GIACOMETTI PARIS












GAGOSIAN GALLERY










GAGOSIAN GALLERY
























" GIACOMETTI: WITHOUT END "
Installation view
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York












ANNETTE ASSISE ( PETITE ) 1956
Bronze ( 51.3 x 15.6 x 23.7 cm ) AP II/II, cast in 1981, Susse
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York




THE CAGE ( FIRST VERSION ) 1950








LA CAGE 1950






ANNETTE VI 




BUSTE D'HOMME 1956 






ANNETTE & ALBERTO GIACOMETTI




SEATED WOMAN 1956




SELF PORTRAIT 1918




' TETE DE FEMME ( FLORA MAYO ) - C. 1927 




GIACOMETTI'S STUDIO BY ROBERT DOISNEAU 1957 












ALBERTO GIACOMETTI 1951
ENCOUNTERS
Viewers of the tall, elongated female figures and the ‘Walking Man’ respond to them in different ways. While the women seem remote and inaccessible, we approach the male with something more like empathy; we follow his hesitant gait, we identify with him. For Giacometti, such encounters are at the core of what it means to be a human being. A number of his sculptures bear witness to a phenomenon that Giacometti experienced as part of his artistic work every day after returning to the study of models in 1949, and one that he wants the viewer to share: the almost living presence of the other person. This perceptual situation corresponds less to Existentialism à la Sartre, in which the “I” is completely centred on itself, and consequently isolated, and experiences the “other” primarily as a threat, than to the relationship of dialogue between the self and the world, anchored in the body, that we see in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. ‘The Cage’ can thus be understood as the representation in model form of Giacometti’s phenomenological realism: the head growing out of the box, as self-consciousness within its own conceptual space circumscribed by the framework, appropriates the image of the reality it encounters, reproduced as a statuette.
This absorption of the external within the self stands in contradistinction to the movement out into the world that is implicit in seeing and perceiving. In his ‘Four Figurines on a Stand’ Giacometti depicts four women, small and far away, beyond the receding perspective of the polished floor. The real topic is the visual and affective relationship of artist or viewer to reality as seen, conveyed through the form of the base. The highpoint of this series is ‘The Chariot’. The twofold movement of the process of perception, the tension between self-revelatory rapprochement and the withdrawal and retreat of the ultimately inexhaustible other, finds its most perfect visual expression in the metaphor of the chariot. This contraption, a half-floating pedestal construction, marks the threshold between the sphere of the figure and that of the viewer. It elevates the appearance of the archetypal woman to the status of an epiphany.
http://www.giacometti-stiftung.ch/index.php?sec=alberto_giacometti&page=begegnen&language=en
LATE WORKS
In late 1949 and early 1950, while still working on the disembodied sculptures drawn from memory, Giacometti returned in his painting to the study of the model. Once again, drawing helped him find a solution to the artistic problems he faced. In his efforts to transpose perceived nature into the persistent reality of the image in such a way that the vital polysemy of the seen and experienced is retained, he reverts back to the graphic artist’s technique of tracing the movements of the eye, the gaze, with the pencil or paintbrush, restlessly sketching around the forms, dissolving their outlines into a breathing space, compacting their centres to energy cores. 
As in the craggy surfaces of his sculptures, Giacometti thus achieves a complete transformation and dematerialization of the representational, which nevertheless appears as a realistic image in the painting. His experience of “visions” and his phenomenological reflections enable him to configure what is actually in front of him as an internal image; the inner frame marks this difference. The evocative yet impalpable details, the void between (and indeed within) things, point to the openness and diffuseness of the mental conceptual space, which acts as intermediary between external reality and that which is visible on the canvas.
In 1951, Giacometti’s work with models led him to establish a greater sense of proximity and corporeality in his sculptures. In his busts of Diego he sought to evoke the living presence of the other through the activation of perception. A first series of works brings this internal perspective to bear on the relationship between head and body. In ‘Diego in a Sweater’, for example, the remoteness and reduction of the head concentrates the entire energy in this core, its charisma dominating everything around it. 
The other series culminates in the ‘Large Head of Diego’, in which Giacometti emphasizes that particular characteristic of the human head which allows it to exhibit two entirely different views, whose psychological expression cannot ultimately be conveyed. He draws the instinctively dominant frontal view closer to the attenuated figures and compensates for it with the broad development of the profile, with which he clearly associates death. He uses the subtly nuanced flattening to activate the view from the fore: the sense of depth in the elongated form that runs from the chin close to us, via the nose and the eyes to the distant ears, combined with the tension between the two halves of the face, forces us to constantly refocus our gaze.
By depicting the act of seeing in this way, Giacometti allows us to perceive an arresting vitality in the head. And every viewer of the work, by completing the task of the seeing and shaping artist, re-invokes the enigmatic presence of his fellow human being. Creating that presence with ever-renewed intensity was Giacometti’s chief goal until the very end of his life. In the portraits of Caroline and other late heads, such as our ‘Head of a Man I (Diego)’, he achieved an almost magical actuality through the medium of painting. Among his sculptures, however, it is the three busts of Elie Lotar, with their dramatic tension between the chaotically formless body and the perfectly sculpted head emerging from the base material, that his work achieves its final culmination.
You may read Alberto Giacometti' s entire biography from his web page to click above web adress. You may visit Alberto Giacometti’s Studio news Photographs by Ernst Scheidegger and Past exhibition news at Bucerius Kunst Forum  from my blog  to click below links.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/01/alberto-giocometti-at-bucerius-kunst.html




GIACOMETTI PAINTING IN HIS STUDIO IN PARIS 1954 
© PHOTOGRAPHER ERNST SCHEIDEGGER 





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