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
(Art is) the residue of vision.
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.
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.
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.
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
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.
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.
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.
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?
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.