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 art-historical 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.
