Giacometti - Face to Face

The exhibition has been extended to 30 May

Giacometti - Face to Face
(10 October 2020 – 17 January 2021)

Alberto Giacometti forged a singular path within European modernism, restlessly seeking a new language for sculpture as a “double of reality”. Today, his elongated, pared-down figures have become iconic. Moderna Museet’s latest exhibition Giacometti - Face to Face is the first large-scale presentation of Giacometti’s work in Sweden in over twenty years and Moderna Museet’s Director Gitte Ørskou predicts the exhibition to be a future classic.

From relatively early on Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was counted among the major interpreters of the post-war era and today his fragile and pared-down figures are associated with the image of a broken humanity. The notion of Giacometti as an artist who lived an isolated life, uninterested in his times, has been cultivated over the years, following the pattern of the artist genius. Giacometti’s daily life, however, was naturally different and his work was influenced by the ideas that were circulating in Paris, a city that before the war had been a hub for artists and intellectuals from all over the world. There were three friendships in particular – with the writers Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett – that came to have a great impact on Alberto Giacometti. In Moderna Museet’s latest exhibition Giacometti – Face to Face the curators Jo Widoff from Moderna Museet, and Christian Alandete from Fondation Giacometti, Paris, set out to trace their shared motives and how their dialogues, and the discourses that formed them, left their mark on Giacometti’s work.

Curators: Jo Widoff, Moderna Museet and Christian Alandete, Fondation Giacometti