Alberto Giacometti

Swiss-born sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) is best known for the bronzes of ghostly and attenuated figures that made him a key member of the Surrealist movement. This retrospective focuses on the artist´s so-called “crisis period” after 1935 and during the Second World War, which coincided with a larger critical juncture for modernism itself. In 1936, Giacometti began to concentrate his attention on the human head, focusing on the model´s gaze, and eventually giving his sculptures an extruded appearance. The artist´s paintings and drawings underwent a parallel transformation, his heavily reworked figures appearing increasingly emaciated and at a remove from their surroundings. Examining more than 100 key works, the contributors to this volume revisit Giacometti in the light of this “crisis period”; essays by Donat Rütiman, Casimiro Di Crescenzo and Thierry Dufr´ne provide reexaminations of the artist´s contribution from a contemporary perspective.