Giacometti. Figur. Raum

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) is one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. His unique and unmistakable sculptural work is of world rank: his elongated, fragile figures, heads and busts, over- and undersized, seem to evaporate in space and yet confront us with enormous physicality and presence. The centre of the exhibition curated by Brigitte Hausmann comprises four bronzes exemplary of his oeuvre, whose motifs increasingly reduce to a few: Petit buste sur double socle (1940/41), Femme debout (circa 1947), La Cage (première version) (1950) and Tête de Diego (circa 1955). These are accompanied by paintings and works on paper that make Giacometti's engagement with figure and space tangible: depictions of standing women, walking men, heads, crowds in the streets of Paris. Giacometti's early work from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s is marked by Cubism and Surrealism. In the following decade to the mid-1940s, phenomenological investigations preoccupied him and he experimented with categories such as scale and distance as well as with material and surfaces. The question of what part viewers play in understanding a work of art concerned him as much as the exploration of sensory impressions. During this time Giacometti created miniature sculptures on disproportionate pedestals to achieve the effect of a distant view. The most consequential insight from this phase is that we perceive a figure with the space within our visual field. From a distance it seems to lose volume in relation to it and becomes in visual memory an immediately perceived whole. Giacometti's visual experience, his view of reality, manifests itself in disembodied, motionless, frontal female individual figures whose stylistic features also characterise the individual heads and the rare more complex compositions such as La Cage for years to come. Femmes debout and Têtes, whose models were mostly the artist's wife Annette and his brother Diego, working from nature, form the main body of sculptures in the 1950s. Through irregular surface modelling, Giacometti brings forth an equivalent to life force. These specific figurations of his mature work are found in sculpture, drawing, prints and painting. The latter gains significance again from the second half of the 1940s onwards. Studio views show that Giacometti worked in different media in parallel. Giacometti's painterly work, coming from a painter's family, is far less well known than his sculptural and changes under its influence. Figurative elements now come to the fore, the space around them becomes an important subject of the painting. Inner frames of brush strokes and lines along the edges of the canvas could be interpreted in analogy to the artist's visual field. Their orientation towards the viewer lends them an intense, iconic presence. Drawings are essential to Giacometti's research and many sketches have survived—but many of his drawings are completed works of art. Printmaking plays a larger role only from the late 1940s. His legacy is the series Paris sans fin. Commissioned in 1957 by Parisian art critic and publisher Tériade, the 150 lithographs with a text fragment by the artist were published posthumously in 1969. A small selection of street scenes on display at Gutshaus Steglitz shows how fascinated Giacometti remained until the end of his life by the constantly changing urban human formations, the scenes and movements—what he called the "totality of life." His entire oeuvre is devoted to this. Helmut Klewan (born 1943) was a gallery owner in his hometown Vienna from 1970 to 1999 and later in Munich. Since then he has been a collector. He holds the most comprehensive private collection of works by Alberto Giacometti in the German-speaking world. Rahmenprogramm (Supporting programme): Thursday, 3 December, 6pm – Steffen Groth reads texts and poems by Alberto Giacometti and texts about the artist; Thursday, 10 December, 6pm – Presentation of the film "Die Giacomettis" (Susanna Fanzun, 2023, music: Hania Rani). Full programme: https://www.berlin.de/ba-steglitz-zehlendorf/bildung-familie-und-freizeit/kultur/gutshaus-steglitz/ausstellungen/giacometti-figur-raum-1595089.php