In the summer of 2021 in Monaco, the Fondation Giacometti is joining forces with the Grimaldi Forum to present for the first time an exceptional retrospective of the work of the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, the most important retrospective held in recent years and one organised by the curatorial office of Émilie Bouvard, the foundation’s scientific and collections director.
This voyage into the creative works of Alberto Giacometti will take place in an atmosphere of wonder, the wonder of Giacometti in the face of “marvellous” reality, as he often put it. He endeavoured to represent, without hierarchy, what he saw around him: loved ones, objects from his studio, everyday things, landscapes from his Swiss childhood or the suburbs of Paris.
The scenography of the exhibition, the richness of the works presented, will in turn amaze the viewer who is placed at the heart of the artist’s intimacy. The exhibition route will devote a significant part to all periods, to all media, sculptures (plaster, bronze), paintings, drawings and prints that make up Giacometti’s work. It will allow a complete view of his creative output, from early works to his surrealist period, from the return to figuration to his post-model work, and to the invention of the great icons of the post-war period.
Bringing together nearly 230 works accompanied by photographs, the exhibition is punctuated with masterpieces and will offer the visitor the opportunity to make wonderful discoveries based around 14 original sequences.
The route will in particular revivify the atmosphere of the studio by revealing the detours and questions that mark the creative process of Alberto Giacometti. The themes favoured by the artist – the representation of the human head, of the face, of the female body – will particularly stand out, but we will also discover his relationship to loneliness, to melancholy and to his hard work with his models: his wife Annette, his brother Diego and his close friends.
The visitor will thus encounter another Giacometti, one who experiments with the limits of sculpture, and the formidable painter who, as well as portraits, also worked with the genres of landscapes and still life.
