Alberto Giacometti

While living in Paris in the 1930s, Alberto Giacometti made a series of surrealist-inspired cage-like sculptures including the work Hour of the Traces, on view in the display. The artist created them from images that he pictured in his ‘mind’s eye’. The sculptures blend abstract shapes with references to the human form or body parts. Their titles are often poetic. Giacometti found strange significance and meaning in these works. He explained: ‘I can sometimes recognise images, impressions and experiences – transformed and displaced – which have moved me very deeply, often without me being aware of it.’

This display includes several of Giacometti’s later works, made after the Second World War. These elongated figures and portrait busts are stretched, scarred and mutilated, evoking feelings of isolation and anxiety. According to the artist, ‘it is in their frailty that my sculptures are likenesses’. The poses and positions of Giacometti’s figures suggest precarity as well as movement, as if fleeting moments have been frozen in time. Another display nearby is In the Palace, a film by artist Daria Martin inspired by Giacometti’s sculpture. Shown together in the darkness of the Tanks, their works both explore dreams, hopes and anxieties through the human form.

‘The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is everything gains grandeur every day, and becomes more and more unknown, and more and more beautiful.’

– Alberto Giacometti