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The Arts Intel Report

Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure

Gordon Parks, Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, circa 1951.

Mar 18 – June 18, 2023
4525 Oak St, Kansas City, MO 64111, United States

The slender, stormy figures of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti are recognizable from a distance, but the idea for these long long shadows came after W.W. II, late in the artist’s career. As a young man, Giacometti was drawn into Cubist circles in Paris. In the 1920s and 30s he went from flat busts of abstract faces to surrealist sculptures. It was in 1948, in an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York City, that the world laid eyes on Giacometti’s postwar work for the first time. Masterpieces from 1945 to 1966, the year of his death, are the subject of this survey, which includes 60 pieces in the mediums of sculpture, painting, and drawing. —Elena Clavarino

Photo: © the Gordon Parks Foundation