The Modern Art Museum in Stockholm, Moderna Museet held Alberto Giacometti’s (1901–1966) exhibition “Face To Face” in the midst of the COVID’s aftermath, which winded up with the museum closing down for a few weeks and happily opening again by the end of April 2021. “Giacometti – Face to Face” is the first large-scale retrospective of Alberto Giacometti’s work in Sweden in over twenty years. Therefore Giacometti’s exhibit along with the excellent opportunity to enjoy the Swiss sculptor’s remarkable Modernist body of work, has meant the triumph of enjoying art exhibitions in Sweden again.

Installation view of “Giacometti – Face to Face”, Moderna Museet, 2020. Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet © Estate of Alberto Giacometti / Bildupphovsrätt 2020

Arguably, the most important sculptor associated with Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism, he started to explore Figurativism leaving the more abstract work behind. Nevertheless, (after studying at the Schools of Fine Arts in Geneva) the fact that Giacometti attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris to study sculpture at the age of twenty-one and lived there for the most part of his life, granted him the opportunity to live Paris’ intellectual life – after World War II Paris was the most ravishing artistic hub at the time – particularly connected to writers Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. Face To Face sets out to trace the marks that Giacometti’s encounter with Beckett’s irrational, closed-off worlds, Bataille’s violent opposition to staid conventions and Genet’s reverential depictions of life in the margins of society, left on the artist’s work.

Installation view of “Giacometti – Face to Face”, Moderna Museet, 2020. Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet © Estate of Alberto Giacometti / Bildupphovsrätt 2020

During this period, abstract art was pretty much the tendency at the time but Giacometti decided to deviate from his surrealistic explorations and find inspiration in prehistoric art and non-western art objects. Furthermore, above everything else he explored the human condition and his vision of what we entitle as human beings. His tall, slender, and fragile representations of the human body are associated with the image of a resilient humanity.

Installation view of “Giacometti – Face to Face”, Moderna Museet, 2020. Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet © Estate of Alberto Giacometti / Bildupphovsrätt 2020

The first work you stumble upon in this exhibition is the early work of human heads created at his father’s studio in his hometown Stampa, in Switzerland. Later on, Giacomeeti himself confessed his depiction work could be done by having the model in front of him, people close to him, or sometimes it could be by memory. Creating from memory is an interesting actor in his body of work. Thus the clash between what is real or not, drawing analogies between realistic depictions and memory. Here lies an important aspect in Giacometti’s work: to reach beyond what you think you know and instead depict the human form in the way reality appears to the eye.