Alberto Giacometti—Unveiled Surrealism

Exhibition program and news
Alberto Giacometti—Unveiled Surrealism: September 1, 2024–January 15, 2025

The Max Ernst Museum Brühl of the LVR is dedicating a major exhibition to Swiss sculptor, painter, and draughtsman Alberto Giacometti (1901–66). Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, the exhibition offers a unique perspective on Giacometti’s work, explored here through the lens of Surrealism and for the first time, highlights the artist’s friendship and creative ties with Max Ernst.

The work of Alberto Giacometti is among the most original artistic creations of the modern period. Known for his elongated and expressive sculptures created after the Second World War, Giacometti also produced a significant body of highly inventive and psychologically charged works in the 1930s, at a time when he was actively involved in the Surrealist circles around André Breton in Paris.

On the occasion of Surrealism’s centennial, the exhibition presents Giacometti‘s works from that period, testifying to the artist’s interest in the unconscious, aggressive and sexual impulses, and the ambiguity of signs. The exhibition looks at the ways in which a surrealist “spirit” endures in Giacometti’s production after his break with the movement in 1935 and his later works of the post-war years. It also explores moments of friendship and creative affinity between Giacometti and Max Ernst, who met in 1929 in Paris, worked in neighbouring studios in the 1930s, and remained friends thereafter.

The exhibition presents over 70 works—sculptures, drawings, paintings, and prints—by Giacometti, featuring several of his major sculptures such as The Couple (1926), Spoon Woman (1927), Suspended Ball (1930), Disagreeable Object (1931), The Nose (1949), and The Cage (first version) (1949–1950).

The exhibition will also display works by Ernst in dialogue with Giacometti’s, as well as photographs and archives underscoring the ties between the two artists.

It is curated by Dr. Friederike Voßkamp, Head of Collection of the Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR and Laura Braverman, Associate Curator at the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.

Accompanying it is a richly illustrated trilingual catalogue featuring contributions by Laura Braverman, Madeleine Frey, Friederike Voßkamp, and Jürgen Wilhelm.

Further information: maxernstmuseum.lvr.de and fondation-giacometti.fr.