In 2008, with a special focus on sculpture, the Fine Arts Museum of Caen, at the initiative and in collaboration with the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation (who entrusted the Caen Museum with the long-term loan of Grande Femme I), will dedicate two exhibitions to Alberto Giacometti.
The first exhibition, to be presented in the Prints and Drawings section of the museum, will consist of the complete series of fifty-two etched engravings Giacometti dedicated to Michel Leiris’s Vivantes cendres, innommées. This collection of poetry, published in 1961, echoes the writer’s attempted suicide in 1957, and is exemplary of the way Giacometti viewed his relationship with the writer : the illustrations unravel almost cinematographically as they parallel and occasionally punctuate the text.
The second exhibition, ambitious in its selection of works and scope of investigation, will deal with Alberto Giacometti’s relationship to contemporaneousness. Instead of confronting a great master’s work with contemporary artists – a rather trite principle – the purpose of this exhibition is to stress the way Giacometti still appeals to artists of today, and in what way his set of themes and his creative processes remain relevant.
A number of themes selected by the curators, Veronique Wiesinger [1] and Thierry Dufrêne [2], will serve as a basic structure for the exhibition : (finger) print / contour, visual hallucination / derealization, flow / entropy, memory / trace, violence / death, body / energy, series / fragment, objects working as symbols… Around these themes, recent pieces by internationally renowned artists – such as Georg Baselitz, Michel Blazy, Antony Gormley, Alain Kirili, Denis Oppenheim, Gabriel Orozco, Javier Pérez, Sarkis or Emmanuel Saulnier - will resonate with sculptures, paintings and drawings from the Annette and Alberto Giacometti Foundation.
The exhibition will be displayed on two levels of the museum, in the rooms devoted to temporary exhibitions and in the contemporary art section of the museum. Some works might be installed in the park, in the immediate vicinity of the museum.
An illustrated catalogue is published in conjunction with each exhibition.
[1] Veronique Wiesinger is Conservateur en Chef du Patrimoine and Director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation
[2] Thierry Dufrêne teaches Art History at Paris X-Nanterrre University
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