Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacomettiwas a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia, as the eldest of four children to Giovanni Giacometti, a well-known post-Impressionist painter. Coming from an artistic background, he was interested in art from an early age...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth10 October 1901
CityBorgonovo, Switzerland
CountrySwitzerland
All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.
I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.
If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.
I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.
Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).
At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.
When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.
Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.
Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.
In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.
I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!
If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.