From 12 July 2013 to 4 August 2013. Madrid. Spain.
Playing fields
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
