The Lympia Gallery, renovated by the Departmental Council, is presenting an exhibition on Alberto Giacometti until October 15, focusing particularly on the last years of his life, from 1960 until his death in 1966.
As if prescribed by the surgery for cancer in 1963, the artist accelerated his production and work. There are his iconic models: his wife, his brother, his mistress, and a photographer friend.
This is the Giacometti of the twilight of his life presented to us through about fifty works. The visitor will discover an artist, a visual artist in his intimacy. His works include drawings, sculptures, paintings, lithographs from Paris, and the French Riviera, where Giacometti visited his publisher in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
The ultimate work, but is there truly an ultimate work for an artist? To answer, let us allow Giacometti to explain the world: “You can compare the world to a block of crystal with innumerable facets.” This is the approach this exhibition invites us to explore.
Giacometti was born in a village in Italian-speaking Switzerland in 1901. His father was an impressionist artist himself. At a very young age, barely ten years old, he began drawing. Paris has always been a magnet for artists; Giacometti arrived there in 1922, where he met Cocteau, Picasso, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. It’s understood that he found himself on the Left Bank. With the war, Giacometti, a Swiss citizen, returned to his country in 1941.
After the liberation, upon returning to Paris, he achieved recognition in 1948. We arrive at our subject: the ultimate work. We share the last years of Giacometti, whose time was limited. Would he be able to complete his work? This was a true anxiety for the artist. Giacometti died on January 11, 1966, at the hospital in Chur, Switzerland.
These slender, faceless figures, launching themselves in defiance of gravity into ethereal spaces, give man another dimension. In a certain way, he has crossed the mirror and conquered time. Giacometti managed to make a man of stone without petrifying him.
This is his genius. His sculptures are free from the heaviness of stone. It can be said: Giacometti conquered time by redefining it.
Thierry Jan
