Menu

Substance and Shadow

Alberto Giacometti sculptures and their photographs by Peter Lindbergh

May 19–July 22, 2017
Britannia Street, London

Installation view Artwork, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh, on pedestals: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view

Artwork, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh, on pedestals: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017, © Peter Lindbergh. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017, © Peter Lindbergh. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view Artwork © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork, on pedestal: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork, on pedestal: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh, on pedestal: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view

Artwork, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh, on pedestal: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view Artwork, on pedestal: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork, on pedestal: © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017, on wall: © Peter Lindbergh. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Works Exhibited

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Buste de Diego (ver 1964–1965), Zurich, 2016, 2016 Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 2017, 70 ⅞ × 47 ¼ inches (180 × 120 cm), edition of 3© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Buste de Diego (ver 1964–1965), Zurich, 2016, 2016

Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 2017, 70 ⅞ × 47 ¼ inches (180 × 120 cm), edition of 3
© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (1961), Zurich, 2016, 2016 Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 70 ⅞ × 47 ¼ inches (180 × 120 cm)© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (1961), Zurich, 2016, 2016

Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 70 ⅞ × 47 ¼ inches (180 × 120 cm)
© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (Poseuse I) (1954), Zurich, 2016, 2016 Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 35 ⅜ × 23 ⅝ inches (90 × 60 cm)© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (Poseuse I) (1954), Zurich, 2016, 2016

Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 35 ⅜ × 23 ⅝ inches (90 × 60 cm)
© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Group of Nine, Zurich, 2016, 2016 Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 23 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ inches (60 × 90 cm)© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Group of Nine, Zurich, 2016, 2016

Hahnemuhle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 grs, 23 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ inches (60 × 90 cm)
© Peter Lindbergh, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti + ADAGP), Paris 2017

About

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces. . . . So it is important to fashion one’s work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.
—Alberto Giacometti

Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. . . . You might discover something much larger than yourself.
—Peter Lindbergh

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, together with photographs by Peter Lindbergh. In 2016, Lindbergh was invited to photograph bronzes and plasters by Giacometti held in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich—the largest and most important collection of Giacometti works in a museum—including 150 sculptures, as well as key paintings and drawings.

Giacometti’s work presents an unprecedented visual discourse on the figure and its relation to space. His highly distinctive entities, molded in plaster or cast in bronze, charge the spatial voids that surround them. Exemplified by the cast bronze Diane Bataille (1947), Giacometti’s oeuvre is at once conceptual and emotional, anonymous and specific, archaic and modern. In his attenuated, elegiac figures—here spanning the period from 1919 through 1965—a sense of mortality clashes with vivid embodiment, figuration becomes existential, and a suffocating compression opens onto both urgency and contemplation. In Femme assise (1956), the folded arms and mottled head of a female figure seem to signify forbearance and resignation, the form as gestural as it is abstract. Often considered as testimony to the ravages of postwar Europe, Giacometti’s art has a timeless, perpetual quality, even as it continues to inflect art historical narratives.

Read more