MY MAGICAL ATTIC: ALBERTO GIACOMETTI SCULPTURES AND THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER LINDBERGH AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI SCULPTURES AND THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS BY
PETER LINDBERGH: SUBSTANCE & SHADOW AT GAGOSIAN LONDON

May 19, 2017 - July 22, 2017

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI SCULPTURES AND THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS BY
PETER LINDBERGH:SUBSTANCE & SHADOW AT GAGOSIAN LONDON

May 19, 2017 - July 22, 2017

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, together with photographs by Peter Lindbergh. In 2016, Lindbergh was invited to photograph bronzes and plasters by Giacometti held in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zurich—the largest and most important collection of Giacometti works in a museum, including one hundred and fifty sculptures, as well as key paintings and drawings.

Giacometti’s work presents an unprecedented visual discourse on the figure and its relation to space. His highly distinctive entities, molded in plaster or cast in bronze, charge the spatial voids that surround them. Exemplified by the cast bronze Diane Bataille (1947), Giacometti’s

oeuvre is at once conceptual and emotional, anonymous and specific, archaic and modern. In his attenuated, elegiac figures—here spanning the period 1919–65—a sense of mortality clashes with vivid embodiment, figuration becomes existential, and a suffocating

compression opens onto both urgency and contemplation. In Femme assise (1956), the folded arms and mottled head of a female figure seem to signify forbearance and resignation, the form as gestural as it is abstract. Often considered as testimony to the ravages of postwar Europe, Giacometti's art has a timeless, perpetual quality, even as it continues to inflect arthistorical narratives.

The impulse to photograph sculpture harks back to the mid-nineteenth century, with the advent of photography itself. Since then, the two mediums—ancient and modern—have become deeply enmeshed. Photography has become part of sculpture itself; sculptors such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, and Medardo Rosso, for example, used it as a developmental tool for their work, producing images that created dramatic new interplays of light and perspective. From a fixed viewpoint, the camera lens directs, freezes, and manipulates the appearance of three-dimensional objects. In turn, sculpture, being a static object, was used as a means by which to discover how timed photographic exposure could reveal its subject differently.

In their stark, tenebrous realism, Lindbergh's potent black-and-white photographs assiduously capture the mood and texture of Giacometti’s sculptures. In images of single sculptures and assembled groups, Lindbergh positions Giacometti's works as both subject and object. The photograph Buste (Tête tranchante) (2016) has echoes of early pictorial photography as well as portraiture, while Group of Nine (2016) suggests an almost scenographic narrative. Both documentary records and autonomous works of art, Lindbergh's photographs provide fresh perspectives on a titan of twentieth century art. Shown in the company of the subjects that they depict, each photograph engages with Giacometti's sculptures in ways that are both critical and celebratory

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/giacomettilindbergh--may-18-2017

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017
Photo by Lucy Dawkins

BUSTE D’HOMME, 1961
Bronze
Dimensions: Height: 45.7 cm

BUSTE D’HOMME ( NEW YORK I ), 1965
Bronze
Dimensions: Height: 54 cm

FEMME DEBOUT, C.1961
Bronze
Dimensions: 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

‘’ All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion one’s work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life. ‘’

Alberto Giacometti

FEMME DEBOUT, C.1961
Bronze
Dimensions: 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

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017
Photo by Lucy Dawkins

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017
Photo by Lucy Dawkins

‘’ Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you... you might discover something much larger than yourself. ‘’

Peter Lindbergh

HEAD OF A MAN( LOTAR I ) C. 1964 – 1965( CAST 1968 )
Bronze
Dimensions: 26 x 28.1 x 10.4 cm
© 2014 Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS , New York

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti Sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

Photo by Mike Bruce

PETER LINDBERGH & ALBERTO GIOCOMETTI

FEMME DEBOUT (1961), ZURICH, 2016
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs
Dimensions: 70 7/8 x 47 1/4 inches
© Peter Lindbergh © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti Sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

Photo by Mike Bruce

SEATED WOMAN 1956

Bronze Patinated

Dimensions: 20,19 x 6,14 x 9,33 in.

Edition Number: E.A. II/II

Collection: Private collection

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Five years later, he expanded his activities to New York, inaugurating his first Chelsea gallery with an exhibition of works from the Pop art collection of Emily and Burton Tremaine. From 1989–1996 he owned a gallery at 65 Thompson Street in Soho with the renowned dealer Leo Castelli, where they showed Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, and other leading artists of the post-war generation.

In thirty years Gagosian has evolved into a global network with sixteen exhibition spaces in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, designed by world-renowned architects including Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Selldorf Architects, and wHY Architecture.

Gagosian’s vibrant contemporary program features the work of leading international artists including Georg Baselitz, Ellen Gallagher, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Taryn Simon, Rachel Whiteread, and many others. Additionally, unparalleled historical exhibitions are prepared and presented on the work of legendary artists such as Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Lucio Fontana, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Roy Lichtenstein, Piero Manzoni, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and others. A series of groundbreaking Picasso surveys curated by John Richardson has been attended by hundreds of thousands of visitors in New York and London.

The gallery publishes scholarly exhibition catalogues and artist monographs, as well as catalogues raisonnés. Since 2012, an innovative and engaging magazine on the gallery’s art and artists has been published four times per year

http://www.gagosian.com/about/the-gallery

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

GIACOMETTI BOGRAPHY

YOUTH & APPRENTICESHIP

Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 at Borgonovo in the Swiss canton of Grisons, the first child of a well-known painter, Giovanni Giacometti, and his wife Annetta. Family life was dominated by the character of his clever and strong-willed mother and by his father’s work as an artist. He was influenced by Segantini, Hodler and the French Post-Impressionists, whose principal subjects included not only landscapes but also Annetta and their four children. Alberto Giacometti was thus an artist’s model from the day he was born; he grew up surrounded by art in the family’s small but carefully organized apartment in Stampa and his father’s adjoining studio. His exceptional talent is discernible even in his childhood drawings, and at the age of just twelve he began modelling heads. The drawing of his mother from 1918 reveals not only his remarkably accomplished handling of form, but also the makings of a conscious stylistic direction derived from the work of the recently deceased artist Ferdinand Hodler, who had been a friend of the family. Reaching the age of twenty, Giacometti wavered for some time between painting and sculpture. His full-figure self-portrait from 1921 synthesizes what he has learnt from the painterly culture and colourist talents of his father, and also attests to a formal rigour and artistic sophistication that were to characterize his working methods throughout his life.

In early 1922 Giacometti entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a leading art school in Paris run by Antoine Bourdelle. Here he met young sculptors from many lands and acquired the professionalism that lends an artistic coherence to even the seemingly chaotic forms of his mature oeuvre. Bourdelle, himself a student of Rodin, sought both a continuation of the great tradition of European sculpture and a response to the dismantling of organic and sculptural form brought about by Cézanne and his new way of seeing. Giacometti was already troubled by the contradiction between the vibrant dynamism of the model and the static, stylized form; he destroyed his own attempts at sculpture, leaving behind only his masterly nude sketches. In them we perceive his particular sense of the bodily form, as remote from sculptural gravity and bulk as it is from the organic surge or muscular tension of the three-dimensional. Instead, he constructs the figure out of transparent spatial structures, energies that flow together as lines connecting points. It is this conception or arrangement – so unusual for a sculptor – that forms the basis for both the weightless sculptures from around 1930 and the phantasmal late figures.

http://www.giacometti-stiftung.ch/index.php?sec=alberto_giacometti&page=jugend&language=en

ANNETTE STANDING C. 1954

Bronze patinated

Dimensions: 18,62 x 4,37 x 7,99 in.

Edition number: 6/8

Collection: Private collection

PETER LINDBERGH & ALBERTO GIOCOMETTI

FEMME DEBOUT ( POSEUSE I ), 1954, ZURICH, 2016
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs
Dimensions: 90 x 60 cm
© Peter Lindbergh © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti Sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

Photo by Mike Bruce

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017
Photo by Lucy Dawkins

BUSTE D’ANNETTE X, 1965
Bronze
Dimensions: 43.9 × 18.4 × 13.7 cm

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017
Photo by Lucy Dawkins

MAN WITH WINDBREAKER 1953

Bronze patinated

Dimensions: 19,68 x 11,25 x 8,85 in.

Edition number: Fondation A. A. Giacometti

Collection: Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti

PETER LINDBERGH & ALBERTO GIOCOMETTI

GROUP OF NINE, ZURICH, 2016
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs
Dimensions: 60 x 90 cm
© Peter Lindbergh © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti Sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

Photo by Mike Bruce

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti Sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

Photo by Mike Bruce

"Substance and Shadow: Alberto Giacometti Sculptures &

Their Photographs by Peter Lindbergh"
Installation View
All Peter Lindbergh artworks © Peter Lindbergh.
All Alberto Giacometti artworks © Succession Alberto Giacometti

(Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris 2017

Photo by Mike Bruce

TOWARDS THE AVANT GARDE

In 1925, sensing that he was unable to advance in the representational and figurative, Giacometti turned to the study of avant-garde sculpture. Artists such as Brancusi, Archipenko, Laurens and Lipchitz had created their central works even before the First World War, drawing on Cubism and the boldly abstract forms of non-European tribal art. This repertoire now served as a source of inspiration for Giacometti, and with his characteristic concentration and intellectual method he created two series of works in which he developed the classical topoi of sculpture in accordance with the new formal principles: the standing male or female figure, the couple, the head with the motif of seeing, the group of three. The first work was the ‘Torso’ of 1925, in which the figure is reduced to three geometrically stylized bodies but, with its tense volume and upwardly thrusting, contrapposto form, nevertheless exudes an organic vitality.

While his Cubist-style works deal more with formal issues such as the explosion and penetration of the sculptured block or the dynamic relationship between the individual elements, his idol-like figurations in the manner of African or Oceanic art constitute semiotic symbols of experienced reality. ‘Spoon Woman’, the first of his arrestingly front-on, large female figures suggestive of cult images, was inspired by spoons in the shape of human beings, and achieves an almost magical presence. The immense oval, which recalls ancient fertility idols, is half-curved towards the viewer; yet even as it opens up it also draws away, thus creating an enigmatic tension.

In the summer of 1927 Giacometti followed this up with another systematic investigative series created in Stampa and Maloja and featuring a sequence of heads based on his mother and father. The experience gained here led in 1928 to the ‘Gazing Head’, his first entirely original invention. Its expressive power lies in the tense outline of the rectangular plaque standing upon the ‘neck’ and the two indentations, which evoke the activity of looking: a disembodied, seemingly phantasmal construction, a membrane reflecting light. Giacometti subsequently produced a series of female plaque figures, variations on this form, so expressive of his non-sculptural sense of the sculptural. The works that followed, including the strikingly poetic ‘Reclining Woman Who Dreams’, once again incorporate real incursions into the third dimension, this time reversing the relationship between indentations and plaque: the latter is resolved into nothing and the signs stand freely in space.

http://www.giacometti-stiftung.ch/index.php?sec=alberto_giacometti&page=avantgarde&language=en

PETER LINDBERGH

Known for his memorable cinematic images, Peter Lindbergh is recognised as one of the most influential contemporary photographers. Born in Lissa (Germany) in 1944, he spent his childhood in Duisburg (North Rhine-Westphalia).
He worked as a window dresser for a local department store and enrolled the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1960’s. He remembers these years : «I preferred actively seeking out van Gogh’s inspirations, my idol, rather than painting the mandatory portraits and landscapes taught in Art schools...».

Inspired by the work of the Dutch painter, he moved to Arles for almost a year, and then embarked a journey hitchhiking through Spain and North Africa. He later studied free painting at the College of Art in Krefeld. Influenced by Joseph Kosuth and the Conceptual movement, he is invited before graduating to present his work at the renowned avant-garde Galerie Denise René - Hans Mayer in 1969. After moving to Düsseldorf in 1971, he turned his attention to photography and worked for two years assisting German photographer Hans Lux, before opening his own studio in 1973. Becoming well known in his native country, he joined the Stern magazine family along with –photography legends Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Hans Feurer, and moved to Paris in 1978 to pursue his career.

Considered a pioneer in photography, he introduced a form of new realism by redefining the standards of beauty with timeless images. His humanist approach and idealisation of women sets him apart from the other photographers as he privileges the soul and the personality. He changed drastically the standards of the fashion photography in times of excessive retouching considering that there is something else that makes a person interesting, beyond their age. He explains : «This should be the responsibility of photographers today to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection.» His singular vision, presents them in their pure state, «in all honesty», avoiding all stereotypes as he privileges a face with hardly any make-up, in a baring that enhances the authenticity and the natural beauty of his women.

He offered a new interpretation of women post-1980’s without paying too much attention to the clothes, considering that : «If you take out the fashion and the artifice, you can then see the real person.» Lindbergh says. British journalist Suzy Menkes points out that the German photographer is : « Refusing to bow to glossy perfection is Peter Lindbergh's trademark – the essence of the images that look into each person's unvarnished soul, however familiar or famous the sitter. »

Lindbergh is the first photographer to include a narrative in his fashion series, his storytelling brought a new vision of art and fashion photography. Over the years, he has created images that marked the history of photography, characterised by a minimalist approach of the post-modernist photography. Back in 1988, Lindbergh garnered international acclaim by showing a new generation of models all dressed in white shirts that he had recently discovered and launched their careers. A year later, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz, young models then, were photographed together for the first time by him for the legendary January 1990 Vogue UK cover.

Pop singer George Michael, the initiator of the movement of the «Supermodels», was inspired by the photographs taken by Lindbergh for Vogue, to create the iconic video for his song Freedom 90, followed by Gianni Versace, marking the beginning of the era of the celebrity-models, which redefined the image of the new modern woman. In the May 2016 issue of the prestigious magazine Art Forum, Lindbergh declares in his interview with journalist Isabel Flower that “a fashion photographer should contribute to defining the image of the contemporary woman or man in their time, to reflect a certain social or human reality. how surrealistic is today’s commercial agenda to retouch all signs of life and of experience, to retouch the very personal truth of the face itself?”

His work is best known for his simple and revealing portraits, his still lives and his strong influences from early German Cinema and industrial surroundings of his childhood, dance and cabarets, but also landscapes and outer space. Lindbergh works with the most prestigious fashion brands and magazines since the late 1970’s, including international editions of Vogue, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar US, Wall Street Journal Magazine, The Face, Visionaire, Interview and W. In 2016, Lindbergh was commissioned for a record third time to create the 2017 edition of the Pirelli calendar, being the first one to photograph it more than twice in the fifty years history of the iconic calendar. He previously photographed the 1996 and 2002 editions.

His work is part of the permanent collections of many Fine Arts museums around the world and has also been shown in prestigious museums and galleries. Among these are the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMa's PS1 (New York), as well as solo exhibitions at Hamburger Banhof (Berlin), Bunkamura Museum of Art (Tokyo) and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow). Most recently, he took part in the exhibition 'Alberto Giacometti Beyond Bronze' presented at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, followed by 'Shadow And Substance' at the Gagosian Gallery in London (May-July 2017). The exhibition 'A Different Vision on FashIon Photography', initiated by the Kunsthal Rotterdam (September 2016-February 2017), is currently on view at the Kunsthalle München (April-August 2017), before traveling to the Venaria Reale (Torino) in Fall 2017.

Lindbergh has directed a number of critically acclaimed films and documentaries: Models, The Film (1991); Inner VoIces (1999) which won the Best Documentary Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2000; Pina Bausch, der Fensterputzer (2001) and Everywhere At Once (2007), which was narrated by Jeanne Moreau and presented at the Cannes and Tribeca Film Festivals.

Lindbergh is represented by Gagosian Gallery. He currently lives between Paris, Arles and New York.

http://www.peterlindbergh.com/biography

THE LURE OF SURREALISM

When ‘Gazing Head’ was first exhibited at a Paris gallery in June 1929, the Surrealists reacted with excitement to the enigmatic object, which eschews the representational and instead gives physical form to an internal, psychical activity. Michel Leiris wrote the first text on Giacometti, which was also fundamental to the unknown young artist’s self-perception; in it he commented on Giacometti’s ability to create these “true fetishes”, the “objective forms of our desires, our wishes”.

The concept espoused by the Surrealists, that works of art should be phenomena from the unconscious raised to the level of everyday reality, was demonstrated by Giacometti with programmatic clarity in his ‘Pocket Emptier’. The base is replaced by an everyday object – a small tray into which the user can empty the contents of a pocket – which, rather than separating the spheres of art and life from each other, serves instead to bind them inextricably together. In this novel formal type, which aims to be an object rather than a work of art, the ethereal plaque sculptures become “disagreeable objects, without pedestal, to be thrown away,” inspired by the concept of bas matérialisme of Georges Bataille, the low, the chaotic and the instinctive. Thus in ‘Project for a Passageway’ we have what seems to be the figure of a woman, her body opened up, lying flat on the ground, without a base, transformed into an architect’s model into which our imaginations can import a whole life odyssey and much more besides.

While these objects continue to suggest physical movements and contacts, Giacometti soon went a step further: in his celebrated ‘Suspended Ball’, the sphere can actually be moved. The invitation to grasp and manipulate seems even more forceful in the small, deceptive machine entitled ‘Caught Hand’.It evokes sadistic urges which, through the threat to the hand, are immediately punished or transmuted into the masochistic. The hand trapped in the rods of the machine is reminiscent of a prosthesis or showroom dummy – the preferred fetishes of the Surrealists with their cult of tactile compulsions and phobias. The most complex of these objects is perhaps ‘Point to the Eye’, a petrified duel on a Mexican playing field with a channel for the sacrificial blood. While we are initially shocked by the aggression implicit in the huge blade pointing towards the eye, we immediately realize that the figure being threatened is Death itself, the eternal victor in the dance of the dead. The work thus opens up a network of dialectic associations which implicate this seemingly so unambiguous object more deeply than any other in the baffling thought processes and metaphorical symbology of the Surrealists.

Giacometti’s last Surrealist works are dominated by thoughts of death, a long-held obsession of his lent fresh relevance by the death of his father in 1933 and depressing developments in contemporary politics and art. He moved away from the esoteric intellectual universe of the Surrealist circle, with its absurd games and its demand that works of art should be mere things. During this period, with the support of his brother Diego, he produced decorative “objects” as a means of earning a living: lamp stands, vases and the like for an elegant boutique. In his artistic activities, however, he sought to make fundamental statements.
The ambivalence or dialectic of life and death comes crucially to the fore in ‘Head-Skull’: its dead right-hand side seems incomparably more powerful and vital than the smoothly abstract left. In the words of art critic Carl Einstein, describing the origins of art, “The work is a protection against the invisible, which lurks everywhere, unleashing terror; a barrier against a diffuse and pervasive animism.” Giacometti was receptive to these spheres, so readily cultivated by the Surrealists: the enthroned figure of ‘The Invisible Object’ refers to them, and “visions” of heads between life and death would also be at the root of his mature, phenomenological realism.

The work known as ‘Cube’ also marks the end of his engagement with the avant garde. The dissolution of the block to reveal a life within defines Giacometti's preoccupation with Cubism. Later he drew a small polyhedron, its shape marked out only by wires, within which an imprisoned human figurine dances: a body entirely free in its organic movement is confronted with the strictly stereometric construction, the living entombed within the dead, a metaphor for the impossibility of capturing living reality through geometric stylizations. For Giacometti, the large polyhedron in Dürer’s engraving ‘Melencolia I’ must have seemed an ominous emblem of this failure, and surely inspired him to create the ‘Cube’. Giacometti later commented that none of his sculptures were abstract except the ‘Cube’, though even this was actually a head. Here, he took stylization to extremes: fascinating, unapproachable, silently closed in on itself like death. Life has withdrawn into the invisible of its own internality.

http://www.giacometti-stiftung.ch/index.php?sec=alberto_giacometti&page=avantgarde&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.

http://www.giacometti-stiftung.ch/index.php?sec=alberto_giacometti&page=spate_werke&language=en

QUEST FOR A NEW WAY OF SEEING

Giacometti soon went beyond the closed block of the ‘Cube’. As with the search for a path of his own that he had conducted in his youth, in 1935 he pursued his self-interrogation through a number of self-portraits. Here he reinterpreted the “cube”: on its uppermost surface he engraves a self-portrait, while on the adjoining side are lines that suggest the studio in which the ‘Cube’ itself may be seen. It is the ‘Nocturnal Pavilion’, as Giacometti also termed the sculpture: the artist’s workshop and at the same time the head, the locus of his creative imagination. The cube has thus been disassembled, transparently revealing its self-conscious life; and it is this that Giacometti would set out to express in his subsequent works. He sought an art of what Franz Meier called “existential reality” or, as he himself put it, a form that could encompass the “totality of life”. Surrealist “objects”, with their metaphorical modus operandi, could not do this; rather, it could only be achieved by works into which the wealth of visible and experienced reality had flowed. This in turn revealed itself to him primarily in the encounter with other human beings, in his engagement with his model.

Giacometti thus knew exactly what he no longer wanted, and the direction in which his quest should lead ; yet he had no idea how a solution might be found, nor can he have realized that the journey would last twelve years. In the first phase he returned to his earlier attempts at stylization, as can be seen in the self-portrait drawings with their attempt to grasp the living in a combination of organic animation and geometric formal power. It was perhaps the major Cézanne exhibition in Paris and Basel in the summer of 1936 that motivated him to undertake a more fundamental rethink. He now began attempting to capture the “seen” directly. As with Surrealism, the goal was to present an image of that which lies within; yet here we are dealing no longer with a dreamlike fiction but rather with the perception of reality. While in his 1937 work ‘Portrait of the Mother’ he succeeded for the first time in crafting this inner vision, it proved far more difficult to achieve in sculpture. Giacometti returned to the open surface of Rodin, and at the same time embarked on the process of “unlearning”: casting aside the old, familiar forms that had always infiltrated themselves between him and his model and engaging instead with the fluctuating immediacy of the living person before him. The smaller the heads became, the more they exuded the vital energy he was looking for. This process of reduction became more acute when, one evening, he caught sight of his girlfriend far away on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and was affected by her vital presence, immediately, even before he could make out any details. In relation to our field of view, the human figure initially appears tiny: oversized pedestals are designed to convey the sense of scale and distance. Right up until 1946, Giacometti remained enthralled by these microsculptures, and by his inability to capture in sculpture the sudden appearance of a person in the distance.

This period saw a number of experiences in Giacometti’s personal life that had a profound impact on his work. In 1938 he was hit by a car, sustaining an injury to his foot; the resulting stay in hospital was to inspire the work entitled ‘The Chariot’. In 1940 he fled the advancing German armies; the shock of the bombing of a refugee convoy and the severed arm of a victim are evoked in ‘The Hand’ and other sculptures of body parts. These works were not produced until after the war, which he spent in Geneva, and they helped him find his way to life-size figurations and an expressively craggy surface. But it was not until 1946 that remarkably over-explicit, vision-like perceptions of reality, the death of a neighbour, and terrifying dreams led to a breakthrough. Albert Skira urged him to write about his experiences for the journal Labyrinthe; The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T. became Giacometti’s key text and one of general importance to literary history as well. Writing it also enabled him to come to terms with the traumatic experience of the sudden death of a travel companion in 1921.

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THE MATURE STYLE

The large sculptures entitled ‘Standing Woman’ mark the emergence of Giacometti’s new style. Here, the impression of sudden appearance is conveyed not by the minuteness of the figures, but rather by their extreme slenderness. Beginning with its sturdy feet rooted in the ground, the body extends upwards until it reaches a head lost in reverie, the dynamic, living surface offering no detail to arrest the eye. Each figure stands before us like a human being, a unity of fascinating presence and unfathomable openness. The hieratic frontality of the women is countered by the ‘Walking Man’, striding endlessly forwards in search of something – Giacometti’s very conception of himself as a creative artist. Closer to the constrained steps of Egyptian tomb statues than to the dramatic stride of Rodin’s athletic ‘Walking Man’, it depicts a tentative forward movement, as of someone hesitantly essaying a first step – or indeed trying to walk for the first time.

In these figures, Giacometti finds a stylistic form that corresponds to the experience of seeing, eschewing both the artificial randomness of Surrealist figurations and the irretrievably defunct bulk of traditional statues. By taking the amorphous, the shapeless a step further, he elevates to the status of an artistic principle something that he had discovered to his horror during his academic studies: “The form disintegrated, it was as if all that was left were grains moving in front of a deep, black emptiness.” The counterpoint to amorphous materiality is the poise of the figures as a whole, their vital energy causing them to grow steeply upwards. The tension between the high stance, the fragile, attenuated form, and the meagre materiality corresponds to the condition of the human being, an uneasy alliance of dignity, vulnerability and ultimate decrepitude. Through this extreme reduction, Giacometti succeeded in creating an image of humanity in which the generation traumatized by the inhumanity of dictatorships and global war could recognize itself

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July 12, 2017

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI SCULPTURES AND THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER LINDBERGH AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY