Substance and Shadow

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces. . . . So it is important to fashion one’s work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.
—Alberto Giacometti

Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. . . . You might discover something much larger than yourself.
—Peter Lindbergh

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, together with photographs by Peter Lindbergh. In 2016, Lindbergh was invited to photograph bronzes and plasters by Giacometti held in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich—the largest and most important collection of Giacometti works in a museum—including 150 sculptures, as well as key paintings and drawings.

Giacometti’s work presents an unprecedented visual discourse on the figure and its relation to space. His highly distinctive entities, molded in plaster or cast in bronze, charge the spatial voids that surround them. Exemplified by the cast bronze Diane Bataille (1947), Giacometti’s oeuvre is at once conceptual and emotional, anonymous and specific, archaic and modern. In his attenuated, elegiac figures—here spanning the period from 1919 through 1965—a sense of mortality clashes with vivid embodiment, figuration becomes existential, and a suffocating compression opens onto both urgency and contemplation. In Femme assise (1956), the folded arms and mottled head of a female figure seem to signify forbearance and resignation, the form as gestural as it is abstract. Often considered as testimony to the ravages of postwar Europe, Giacometti’s art has a timeless, perpetual quality, even as it continues to inflect art historical narratives.