Sculptures Dans L'Atelier (Lust 185), rare hand signed etching, 1964

Alberto Giacometti   Master Artists

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss painter and sculptor born in 1901 in Borgonovo and died in 1966 in Chur, Switzerland. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a professional painter and introduced his son to art from a young age, first training him in portraiture. He attended the Beaux Arts in Geneva and then trained in Antoine Bourdelle's studio at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse.

In 1926, he moved to Paris and became fascinated by Cubism , African art and ancient sculptures. He then created dreamlike plaster sculptures that brought him closer to surrealists such as Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Louis Aragon, André Breton and Salvador Dali . But little by little, he abandoned the themes of death, violence and uncertainty to undertake series of heads. This new subject of interest earned him his exclusion from the surrealist movement in 1935 and he then began to produce large-scale sculptures.

From 1947 onwards, Giacometti's style became increasingly recognisable: he depicted long, slender bronze bodies, often enclosed within a defined space, a cage or a plinth. The long figures that occupy this expanse have thin bodies, as if they had been hollowed out; they resemble trees but are in motion, like distant, past memories. In 1948, Alberto Giacometti met Pierre Matisse, son of the painter Henri Matisse , and from this stimulating artistic relationship would emerge one of the sculptor's most prolific periods, in which he produced his greatest works.

His works are world-renowned and have been exhibited in the greatest modern art museums: the Musée de l'Orangerie, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Centre Pompidou, but also abroad, in London, New York, and Copenhagen. He also won prestigious awards: the Carnegie Prize in 1961, the Grand Prix for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1962, the Guggenheim Prize in 1964, and the Grand Prix International des Arts de France in 1965.