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12/6/2013

Giacometti

Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid

Curator of the exhibition: Dr. Annabelle Görgen-Lammers

Giacometti. Terrenos de juego is a show dedicated to exploring the sculptor Alberto Giacometti's lifelong investigations into the concept of space. The exhibition focuses on Giacometti's little-known Surrealist sculptures designed to resemble "game boards" with which the artist, as if building a scale model, developed his concept of "sculpture as place", as a playing field where the pieces are art, life and death.
Following these initial explorations, Giacometti began to work on his visionary creations for monumental squares, in which observers are incorporated as so many pieces in an oversized game. From this perspective, the exhibition revisits his famous multi-figure groupings of the post-war period, where different places and times converge on a single bronze base. Meanwhile, the sculptor turned his legendary 18-metre-square studio into a testing ground for spatially staging his works, and himself in relation to them. And so the exhibition gradually leads up to Giacometti's great artistic legacy, the world-famous group of 3-metre-high figures he designed for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, including the Walking Man and Large Woman. The show thus becomes a playing field for visitors to explore.

The exhibition, co-produced by FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE and the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE, features nearly 190 sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints and photographs from 32 public and private collections around the world, including Kunsthaus Zürich–Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the MoMA, New York; Tate, London; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the MNAM-Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, among others.

Sculptures as Game Boards

In the early 1930s, Giacometti's ties with Surrealism led him to develop horizontal sculptures conceived as scale models of physical places, the most famous of which is his Model for a Square (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice). In these sculptures, the space offers itself up, artwork and pedestal overlap, and real space and real time both become part of the piece.

Given their scale and nature, these groundbreaking works are reminiscent of game boards on which the sculptor "plays" with the arrangement of the different elements on the base that unites them and with the "movements of those interrelated elements", as the artist himself once said. No More Play (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) is one of the most important examples. The games that unfold revolve around eroticism, life and death, and both the sculptures and preliminary drawings displayed here reveal how the artist experimented with different distances between the various elements and alternately prioritised an overhead or frontal perspective. At the same time, these games draw the once-passive observers in, physically incorporating them into the sculpture itself.

In 1934 Giacometti and the Surrealists parted ways, and he made considerable strides in developing his reflections on distance, dimension and the interrelations between different elements in his sculptures. In the programmatic article entitled "The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T.", written in 1946, Giacometti examined himself in relation to others, space and time. Finally, he imagined a time-space disc that would give material form to the perceived connection between experiences, thoughts and fears: "Suddenly, I had the feeling that all the events existed simultaneously around me. Time became horizontal and circular, it was space at the same time. [...] A disc with a radius of about two metres [...] With a strange pleasure, I saw myself walking on this disc—time—space," Giacometti recounted.

Press contact:
Alejandra Fernández and Nuria del Olmo, Comunicación de MAPFRE. Tel 91 5818464; 91 5812216 / 690.04.91.12 E-mail: alejandra@fundacionmapfre.org - ndelolm@mapfre.com

Fundacion Mapfre
Paseo de Recoletos 23 - Madrid - 28004
Monday 14.00 - 20.00
Tuesday - Saturday 10.00 a 20.00
Sunday 11.00 - 19.00
Entrance free

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