Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was born on 10 October 1901 in Borgonovo, in the Val Bregaglia valley of the Swiss canton of Graubünden, the eldest son of the Post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti. After early training in Geneva, he moved to Paris in 1922 to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, and the French capital remained his home and working base for the rest of his life. Over the following decades he emerged as one of the defining sculptors of the twentieth century, his work moving through Surrealism and into a deeply personal existentialist figuration that would shape the course of modern art.

Giacometti's early Surrealist period produced some of the movement's most unsettling objects, among them La Boule suspendue, a suspended ball hovering above a crescent form whose charged, latent energy made it a canonical work of the genre. By the mid-1930s, with works such as Tête de femme, he broke from Surrealism and turned to sustained observation of the human figure, beginning a lifelong inquiry into how a face or body actually appears to a watching eye. The post-war years brought his most celebrated sculptures: L'Homme au doigt, a lone figure whose outstretched arm cuts through empty space; La Place, a bronze group of attenuated figures sharing a rectangular base yet locked in mutual isolation; and L'Homme qui marche I, the striding, skeletal male form held in the Fondation Beyeler that became an emblem of fragile, persisting humanity. The Femmes de Venise series, presented at the 1956 Venice Biennale, crystallised his mature language of eroded verticality, and in 1962 the Biennale awarded him its Grand Prize for Sculpture. His collaboration with Samuel Beckett on the stage design for En attendant Godot in 1963 extended his spatial and existential concerns into the theatre. Alongside the sculpture, painted portraits of his brother Diego — the Tête de Diego series — and of his wife Annette demonstrate that his investigation of presence and perception was equally alive on canvas.

Giacometti's work is held by major institutions across Europe and North America, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, and LaM in Villeneuve-d'Ascq, with particularly comprehensive holdings maintained on long-term loan from the Fondation Alberto Giacometti at both the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Fondation Beyeler. The Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti and its Institut Giacometti in Paris serve as the primary institutional steward of the estate, managing reproduction rights in collaboration with ADAGP and overseeing scholarly and curatorial projects. Recent exhibitions — including Alberto Giacometti: The Measure of the World at Kunsthalle Bremen, Alberto Giacometti. Faces and Landscapes of Home at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, and a presentation at Espace Louis Vuitton Osaka — confirm the sustained international engagement with his legacy, while critical projects at the Barbican Centre and the exhibition Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha reflect the continuing dialogue his work opens with contemporary artists.