Presentation
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Organiza: Fundación Proa
Curador: Véronique Wiesinger
Patrocinador: Fundación Alberto y Annette Giacometti / Base7 Proyectos Culturales / Fundación Proa
Auspicia: Tenaris - Techint 

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Fundación Proa is presenting the first retrospective of Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, Switzerland, 1901-París, 1966) ever held in Argentina. Giacometti specialist and curator Véronique Wiesinger has selected 148 works produced from 1910 to 1960, most of them from the Collection of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris, though some from private collections in Argentina and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

The exhibition was organized by the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, Base7 Projetos Culturais and Fundación Proa, and it is sponsored by Tenaris – Techint.

Born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, Alberto Giacometti is considered one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century. As a young man in 1922, he moved to Paris—home at that time to artists involved in the exciting cultural scene surrounding the early avant-gardes—where he would live until the time of his death in 1966. Despite Giacometti’s early recognition, this is the first time that these 148 works from the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation will be exhibited in South America, under the curatorship of that foundation’s director, Véronique Wiesinger.

The exhibition encompasses the major themes of Giacometti’s creative life: his training with Cézanne; the influence of Cubism; his discovery of African art in the 1920s; the ongoing importance of magical thinking and Surrealism in his work, and the invention of a new representation of the human being. Giacometti’s intellectual restlessness brought him into contact with the major thinkers of his time: André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, many of whom he portrayed in paintings and sculptures.

The show begins with the presentation of his first paintings, drawings and sculptures, media in which he would continue to work throughout his life; it culminates with his monumental works from the 1960s.

Giacometti worked with the decorator Jean Michel Frank on the design of works of decorative art. Some of those included in the exhibition were acquired by Argentine collectors in 1939. Indeed, in 1929 Argentine Elvira de Alvear became the first person to purchase a work by Giacometti in Paris. The exhibition also includes the sculpture Tête qui regarde.

The clusters of work formulated by the curator are the discovery of primitive art; the question of the human head; objects; cages and frames; the dimensions of representation; figures; busts and monuments. Each of them betrays the artist’s aesthetic concerns, which are also reflected in his writings and interviews.

The exhibition catalogue, which is a joint publication of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation and the Fundación Proa, includes texts by the curator, Giacometti’s own writings, a biography of the artist, reproductions of works, as well as never-before-published research on Giacometti’s ties to South America. It constitutes, therefore, essential reference material on the artist in the Spanish language.

Fruit of three years of work and close collaboration between the Giacometti Foundation, the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro and Fundación Proa, this ambitious exhibition was produced by Base7 Projetos Culturais; it has been supported by the French Embassy in Argentina and sponsored by Tenaris – Organización Techint.

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