This show was selected as part of Paris Oomph—a curated roundup of the best contemporary art exhibitions and events held by galleries, museums, and institutions in town during Art Basel Paris, October 2024.
In every stage of his career, Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) expressed his desire to tightly connect sculpture and painting by painting some of his plaster and bronze sculptures. From his first works to those he created close to his death, he made a hundred or so painted plasters, 55 of which belong to the Fondation Giacometti, as well as 60 or so painted bronzes.
Prompted by a desire to make “living” figures, the artist took up his palette and paint brushes and “breathed life” into his sculptures, small as well as big. At times, he went as far as painting on completed works installed in an exhibition. In this undertaking, Giacometti was influenced by his taste for the art of archaic Antiquity, of Italian Primitives as well as non-Western arts.
“One shouldn’t talk of painted sculptures, only sculptures,” Giacometti explained to his gallerist Pierre Matisse in 1950, “the color is part of the sculptures, they are painted with oil, like the paintings.” The painted bronze sculptures he spoke of here, perplexing and fragile, had little success though, and the reticence of the collectors put an end to his passion. Several of these sculptures have lost the intensity, if not the integrality of their colors with the passing of time. The painted plasters, on the other hand, for the most made on works that remained in his studio, were conserved by the artist until his death, which kept the colors fresh.
In the first experimentations made during his pre-surrealist period, he applied paint plainly, using a rather free and naturalist palette for the portraits (Flora Mayo); in the post-war works, the paint replaces or completes the lines the artist etched into the material in order to “draw” the surface of his figures. The colored interventions are made with hatchings and lines in a color range limited to red, brown and black. Giacometti went back to applying paint plainly in his last period, especially in the big painted bronzes he set up in the courtyard of the Fondation Maeght, not paying much attention to the predictable effect of bad weather.
The exhibition gathers an exceptional body of painted plasters, among them Stele (1958), Women of Venice (1956-57), several very tall figures; two versions of The Cage (1949-50), one of which is a painted bronze; several paintings on canvas and a series of drawings, most never shown before.
at The Institut Giacometti, Paris
until November 3, 2024