Page 132 - B-ALL eng

On the fringe of surrealism, his temptation to abstraction will be compared to Brancusi and Laurens.
Finally, his style at maturity, after 1935, shows his definitive return to figuration from model.
This ultimate moment of his art converses with other sculptors and their inspirations of the Antiquity as Rodin, Bourdelle and Maillol.Selection of graphic arts and archival documents also evoke Giacometti’s legendary Parisian studio through lithographs of the artist and photographs of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century such as Brassaï, Denise Colomb, Sabine Weiss or Herbert Matter.
Giacometti spent his life practicing the art of erasure. He has stripped his works of all signs to identify them.
Universal and mysterious, his slender human forms, almost abstract and infinite, accompanied him like the ghostly figures that haunted his «cave».
The Swiss artist refused the concept of a smooth and clean art.
For him, sculpture is «a question, an interrogation, an answer.
It cannot be finished or perfect.
These distant silhouettes with fuzzy outlines seem worn, gnawed, like buried memories that the memory can barely keep. The figure is his obsessive subject; tireless, Giacometti tries to see in it the real.
In his art, the being often evokes the tree planted in the ground in a majestic line that extends towards the sky but in his busts, it is often reduced to the size of a rock, mineral and packed. Giacometti has tried all his life to make a presence in the world, in sculpture and painting.
His mind roams the universe forever, immortal message at the crossroads at meeting the walkers of time.