Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966)
Born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, into an artistic family, his father Giovanni was a noted post-Impressionist painter, Alberto Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922, where he would spend most of his working life.

In the late 1920s he became closely associated with the Surrealists, producing enigmatic, dreamlike objects such as Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m., before breaking with the movement in the mid-1930s to return to working from the living model.

It was after the Second World War that Giacometti arrived at the language for which he is now revered: human figures pared down to slender, attenuated forms, solitary walking men, standing women, figures crossing an empty square.

Rough-surfaced and impossibly thin, they seem at once monumental and fragile, presence and disappearance held in the same gesture. Friend of Sartre and Beckett, Giacometti became one of the defining figures of post-war European art, his sculptures read as meditations on solitude, perception, and what remains of the human at its essence.

He continued to work obsessively from life, often his brother Diego and his wife Annette, until his death in 1966. Today his work stands among the most significant and sought-after of the twentieth century.