Alberto Giacometti Intimate Immensity documents the first exhibition in the United States focused on the artist’s cycle of very small human figures. Created in France and Switzerland during the Second World War, this unique body of work represents a profoundly transformative phase of Giacometti’s career: at no more than three inches tall and as thin as nails, these works reveal the path that led the artist to the elongated figures for which he became famous in the final two decades of his life.

 

In spite of their size, or perhaps precisely because of it, the figures in Intimate Immensity are monumental in their presence, expressing Giacometti’s desire to withdraw from what he called “natural size” in order to best represent his own perception of scale and experience.

 

The catalogue includes an excerpt from Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical treatise The Poetics of Space, an extended essay by Giacometti scholar Casimiro di Crescenzo, and a translation of a rare interview with the artist, on the subject of scale, conducted by Pierre Dumayet in 1963.