what to visit in Malaga

The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) said somewhere that what motivated his unforgettable paintings and sculptures, that are still considered some of the most outstanding works of art of the first half of the 20th century, was the personal aim of attacking, of feeding off, of defending one self, of being as big as possible, of living his own adventure, of taking part in his own war.

Everything that has to be known about the way that Giacometti felt art and his condition as an artist seems to be contained in these words, that total, absolute, fatal and unavoidable commitment to a cause that permeated him. However, his aspect was distant and elegant, like that of a serious existentialist with an irresistible romantic aura.

This aspect was immortalized in a series of memorable photographs made by masters such as Irving Penn, Man Ray or Richard Avedon which now can be seen until the 5th of February as part of this excellent exhibition of over 200 works. For this exhibition they have followed a chronological order, the first retrospective made in Spain for over 20 years has been dedicated to him by the Picasso Museum in Málaga (http://www2.museopicassomalaga.org/03_1frameset.htm).

Despite being twenty years older than Giacometti, Pablo Picasso was much more than an important personal friend of his. Their worlds and preoccupations converged in many points that the exhibition explores, establishing a fruitful dialogue between them both.

Everything began on that far away day in 1932, when Giacometti was deeply moved, and even transformed, by the exhibition of the Spanish artist in Zurich. With the impressions that he then received, he frenetically filled a notebook, a notebook that’s exhibited for the first time to the public in the exhibition in Málaga.

Needless to say, however, that the Giacometti’s reach encompasses a lot more distance than the shadow that Picasso lay upon him, surrealism (group in which he militated enthusiastically from the end of the 1920s thanks to his friendship with André Masson and Jean Cocteau, an attachment that has as its prime witness the unsettling beauty of works as suggestive as ‘Reclined woman who dreams unpleasant objects’) or the rest avant-gardes movements to which he was linked with.

Giacometti was able to recreate, above all, his own aesthetic language that was tremendously full of meaning and whose maximum exponent are those sculptures of beings with unconceivable thinness, of extreme lightness, whose apparent fragility and desolation give the feeling of being enhanced in some way by the solid bases that they generally rest on, thus creating new spacial relations that are noticeably different to the monumental quality of traditional sculpture that would have to have an inevitable influence on contemporary art.

Paul Oilzum

The exhibition at the Picasso Museum presents a brilliant and astounding staging that allows it to be seen in the shape of some sort of metallic forest, an imitation of their original position in Giacometti’s legendary workshop in Montparnasse. Lose yourself there if you rent apartments in Malaga

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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