Alberto Giacometti exhibition launched in Zurich

Kunsthaus Zürich launches exhibition project on Alberto Giacometti Keystone-SDA

Alberto Giacometti's major works from his surrealist period and his famous sculptures from the period after 1945 are now on display in two rooms in the Chipperfield Building of the Kunsthaus Zürich.

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This exhibition will run until next autumn and marks the start of a larger project. From autumn, the comparatively small exhibition will be extended to four rooms. This comprehensive exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s work will be newly curated and will show his entire artistic oeuvre, from his early works to his later works, the Kunsthaus Zürich announced.

The background to this project is that the collection of Giacometti’s works will have a new home at the Kunsthaus, in the Chipperfield Building. Previously, they were housed in the so-called Müller Building of the Kunsthaus. As the Kunsthaus itself writes, the institution is home to “the world’s most important museum collection of works” by the artist of the century on permanent loan from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation.

The first inaugural exhibition, which is now starting, already has a highlight in store: for the first time, the Kunsthaus is showing a bronze cast of the surrealist masterpiece “L’Objet invisible” (1934/35). This bronze cast is a new loan from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation and a private collection from Switzerland.

Key work of modernism

The sculpture shows a stylised female figure holding an invisible object with her hands. This sculpture is considered a key work of modernism, the Kunsthaus writes. This is because it “makes the invisible and unknown tangible”.

The inaugural exhibition also features selected paintings from the Kunsthaus collection by Giacometti’s companions and contemporaries.

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century and was also a painter and graphic artist. He is best known for his stick-thin figures, whose anatomy is indistinct; the head and face are only hinted at. These sculptures were created in Paris in the post-war period and established the artist’s international reputation.

For all his cosmopolitanism, Alberto Giacometti always remained attached to his homeland, Bergell and the place of his origin, the former Stampa – and especially to his family.

Giacometti is of particular importance to the Kunsthaus Zürich, not least because of the permanent loans from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation, which are supplemented by works from its own collection and from the Kunstfreunde Zürich. The Alberto Giacometti Foundation was established in Zurich in 1965, shortly before the artist’s death on January 11, 1966.

Adapted from German by AI/ts

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