Saturday, January 31, 2015

Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti



We were lucky to arrive in Vienna on the very last day of the Alberto Giacometti exhibition at the Leopold Museum. It was double luck, since the museum was a just a few feet from our hotel and - entrance was free for the last day.
Since my early student years I have been an admirer of Alberto Giacometti's art ( I still have the catalogue to the 1987 Nationalgalerie Berlin retrospective), and it was therefore a special treat to see his work presented in a retrospective. This included a variety of his early minor works and that of his father plus good examples from other contemporary artists who may have influenced him.
Giacometti, of course, is famous for his long, lean sculptures: "Reduced, as they are, to their very core, these figures evoke lone trees in winter that have lost their foliage. Within this style, Giacometti would rarely deviate from the three themes that preoccupied him—the walking man; the standing, nude woman; and the bust—or all three, combined in various groupings." (Catalogue Metropolitan Museum of  Art).
My only criticism to the exhibition is that I had wished to have seen more of Giacometti's later sculptures and unfortunately, due to its popularity, the venue was overcrowded so that you had to struggle to get a view of the exhibits.

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