Posted on
2025-12-22
Obsessed with drawing, Giacometti never ceased, throughout his life, to engage hand and gaze in his attempt at capturing the elusive reality of beings and things. From his training years to his mature works, drawing occupied a central and daily place: whether he worked with a model, copied the old masters or drew from memory, he constantly went back to that fundamental practice. “What needs to be said, what I believe is that, whether it concerns sculpture or painting, only drawing counts,” he wrote.
Trained at a young age in the studio of his father Giovanni Giacometti, a post-impressionist painter, Alberto Giacometti learned to observe and convey reality with a stroke. In his sketchbooks dating from his student days in Geneva, at La Grande Chaumière with Antoine Bourdelle, then, after the Second World War, in the cafés of Montparnasse or in the studio of rue Hippolyte-Maindron, he drew relentlessly: objects, faces, passers-by, fragments of the world. Drawing is where the most acute tension between the visible and the gaze, between the being and its appearance, between presence and distance takes place.
Opposite – Tête d’homme, 1961
Exhibition runs through to December 10th, 2025
Mennour
28, avenue Matignon
75008 Paris
France
mennour.com