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 art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.
In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession ... That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.
If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.
Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.
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.
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.
When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.
In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.
The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and - instead of giving up - you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling - be it an illusion or not - that something new has opened up.
That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.