Giacometti, The Egyptian: The Altes Museum organizes an exhibition showing the Swiss sculptor’s passion for ancient Egypt
Image by joelogon via Flickr
Now integrated into the sculpture halls of the Egyptian Museum’s permanent exhibition, works by Giacometti from the Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung in Zurich invite visitors to listen in to a dialogue between artists as they communicate with each other in a common language of forms which traverses several millennia. By being placed in this context, Giacometti’s work reveals how steadfastly rooted in the past it is, as well as allowing the art of the Ancient Egyptians to once again exude an extraordinary freshness and relevance.
Unlike other modern artists, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived obsessed by Egyptian aesthetics. The Altes Museum in Berlin celebrates the Egiptomania of Alberto Giacometti through twelve sculptures and two sketches by the Swiss sculptor, which today share the same space with the bust of Nefertiti and other works from the museum’s extensive Egyptian collection.
Cult of the Artist: Giacometti, the Egyptian, creates risky analogies between the mute and serene pose of ancient statues from the distant past and the famous elongated sculptures forged in the twentieth century. This experiment is the fruit of labor of two Egyptian art enthusiasts, Wildung and Christian Klemm, members of the sculptor’s foundation in Zurich, who stressed the “Egyptian” in Giacometti, as seen in the “structure” of his works, “the intensity in the gaze” of his characters, and “the spatial distribution of his figures.”
Next to Nefertiti, a muse for Berliners who see in her the most beautiful woman in this city, the spectator finds a bust of Annette Arm, the flesh and blood muse who Giacometti met in Geneva and whom he married in 1949, back in Paris, the city that most inspired him and where he lived for many years. The statuette on a large pedestal, 1952, shows clear plastic symmetries with the figure of an Egyptian gravedigger dating from 1850 BC. The most monumental work of Giacometti in this show is that of the Marching Man, which is oddly contrasted with a wooden figure only ten centimeters in height from 1900 BC. Equally curious parallels exist between the Cube in bronze by the sculptor, with engravings, and the granite statue in the form of a cube of Senenmut, full of hieroglyphics.
The exhibition runs through February 15, 2009.
Extracted and translated from elpais.com
