Birth Year : 1901
Death Year : 1966
Country : Switzerland
Alberto Giacometti, the Surrealist sculptor known for his nervous, elongated
forms, was born in Stampa, Switzerland. Giacometti started drawing at the
age of nine, painting at twelve and created his first sculpture at fourteen.
His father was a well-known Impressionist painter and Giacometti's first
teacher. In 1919, Giacometti began studying sculpture in Geneva and then,
for three years, with Bourdelle in Paris. When he began to work on his
own, Giacometti found that he had difficulty working from the figure which
seemed to disintegrate as he worked. He tried working instead from his
imagination and continued to do so for ten years. At this time Cubism,
African art and the sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz, influenced his work. His
style gradually changed to become first thin and tablet-like and then solid
and compact, in structures like "The Couple", and "Spoon Woman". These
last were bizarre, amusing monoliths, monumentally concave, combining a
powerful physical confrontation with erotic content.
In 1928 Giacometti felt the need to open his forms, creating grill-like
works and then a series of cages-skeletal structures that create three-dimensional
environments, equivalent to Surrealist paintings. These culminated in the
precise and fantastic "Palace at 4 A.M.", a construction of wood, wire,
glass and string. In 1935, Giacometti returned to working from the live
model, focusing on the tiny variations of each profile of the body. By
sensitively exaggerating or reducing each detail the projections, however
tiny, reach out and make the surrounding space visible and part of the
work. These tactile elongated sculptures, for which Giacometti is best
known, tend to disintegrate at close range. But viewed at some distance
they express a universal sense of a living organism. Giacometti's isolated
single figures or groups which pass each other without communication convey
an anxious search arising from their loneliness, or stand straight and
detached like trees in an Alpine forest.
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Alberto
Giacometti
Annette
in the Studio
Alberto
Giacometti
Man
Walking
Alberto
Giacometti
Small
Nude
Alberto
Giacometti
Diego
A La Chemise Ecossaise
Books about Alberto Giocometti |
