Alberto Giacometti constructed sculptures of the human form from clay, slowly creating the figures by hand and leaving imperfections. Pablo Picasso turned bodies into primal totems, sometimes influenced by his ceramic work. “To make a dove,” he said, as reported in The Atlantic after his 1967 MoMA retrospective, “you must start by wringing its neck.” For the Gagosian exhibition “Body as Matter,” the curator Richard Calvocoressi places these two artists in dialogue with each another, and then pulls sculptures by the American artist Bruce Nauman, born in 1941, into the conversation. The subject is the human body, post–W.W. II, rendered in radical and reductive ways. Nauman, so much younger, built upon the foundations laid by Picasso and Giacometti. —Zack Hauptman