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
Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.
That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.
What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.
The form is always the measure of the obsession.
The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.
Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.
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.
Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.