Manifesto exhibition Giacometti

“Annetta” Beatrice Brandini

Until February 1 2015 at GAM in Milan there is a beautiful exhibition of Alberto Giacometti, curated by Catherine Grenier, director of the Foundation Alberto and Annette Giacometti in Paris.

Alberto Giacometti “The big woman IV”, a work on show

The exhibition sponsored by the City of Milan and 24 HOURS Culture, presents a path featuring 63 works, including sculptures, paintings, drawings and photos, highlighting one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century.

Alberto Giacometti “Annette”

Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland, the father is a post impressionist painter that will pass the passion for art very soon. In fact, the great artist begins to paint and sculpt a young man, showing great talent and a penchant for sculpture, tilt that will take him only eighteen years in Paris, to take lessons and courses in sculpture.

View of a room of GAM in Milan

For a time, he moved to Rome where he is passionate work of Giotto and Tintoretto.

Alberto Giacometti’s “Woman Walking”, a work on show

Member of the surrealist movement, they come off early enough to take a very personal artistic language. Actually for Giacometti’s imagination and the unconscious are important, but also the reality with its strong references (sexuality is one of these). Idealization of the figures in myth, we are moving towards a direct observation of reality.

Alberto Giacometti “The clearing”, a work on show

Giacometti fact was not inclined to intellectualism that were part of the artistic currents and its posters (cubism, surrealism …), in fact, even if inspired or influenced, wanted to make an art “pure”, an art almost primitive.

View of a room of GAM in Milan

The link with reality, obsessive observation of this, means that the figures of Giacometti are nearly drained by it. The reality is urgent, insistent, consumes the human being (his emaciated figures) but it never completely canceled, and it is here and this the drama of humanity. There isn’t salvation and there is never fullness.

Probably having lived the drama of the two wars, the atrocities of the concentration camps, have deeply impressed, much to develop a vision bitter existence. As well as the friendship with the father of existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, and the questions on the precariousness of life, its meaning, and the failure on the loneliness of being.

Alberto Giacometti in his studio. Photo of Gordon Parks

Alberto Giacometti “Four women on a pedestal”. Work on show

I love Giacometti from always, probably because it fits perfectly with the feminine ideal of people like me who has studied fashion, the “famous” model in which birth your creations. But with the passage of time I appreciate him for that form of anxiety that transpires, very strong for me, from his works, especially the sculptures. These slender figures that seem to break at any moment, that sometimes walk for an imaginary and uncertain destination, are the voice of humanity, of our fragility and worries, our ghosts and dreams. If they could talk probably would declare their painful to hear …

Alberto Giacometti for Life magazine. Photo by Lyonel Feininger, 1951

“The world surprises me every day. Becomes larger, more wonderful, more elusive, more beautiful. The detail fascinates me, the little details, like the eye in a face, or the moss on a tree. But not most of all, because how can you make the difference between the retail and the set? Are the same details to make the set … to make the beauty of a form”. Alberto Giacometti

His bronze sculpture “Homme qui marche” in 2010 was sold at Sotheby’s for 104,3 $ million, setting a record of the art world’s most expensive.

Alberto Giacometti “Bust of Annette”, a work on show

Is quite abnormal spend our time, instead of living, trying to copy the head, to force the same person for five years in a chair every night, in a vain attempt to make a portrait …… And the adventure, the great adventure, is to see something unknown arise every day, in the same face: an adventure bigger than any trip around the world”. Alberto Giacometti

Good life to all!

Beatrice