The exhibition “Legacy” brings together previously unseen works and new productions by Sophie Ristelhueber with a group of works by Alberto Giacometti. Internationally recognized for her photographic work on war, the artist proposes here an equally important, but less publicized, reflection on the traces of family memory inscribed in places and objects of reminiscence.
Presented this autumn at the Giacometti Institute, the exhibition “Legacy” places in dialogue old works never exhibited before as well as some new productions by Sophie Ristelhueber and a series of works by Alberto Giacometti. Internationally acclaimed for her photographic work on the war, the artist presents here a reflection as important but less known to the public around traces of family memory inscribed in the places and objects of reminiscence.
In the œuvre of the Swiss artist, Ristelhueber chose the enduring part played by the family constellation and the environment of his childhood by selecting a gallery of painted portraits and a series of heads
in plaster of his family, made at various times in his life. Emphasising for the first time at the Institute the importance of painting in Giacometti’s œuvre, this presentation of various family portraits and portraits of close friends gives us the opportunity to understand the force and singularity of those works of intimacy.
To the house of Stampa, Giacometti’s native village, with which he remained connected throughout his life, Ristelhueber associates her family home of Vulaines, which was the theatre of her childhood and the subject of many photographic series suffused with fascination and melancholia. Situated at the meeting point of the intimate and the public, of memory and oblivion, those traces represent Giacometti’s personal story, just like Ristelhueber’s recollections.
The correspondence between individual experience and the human condition that underlies both artists’ work, is organised in a confrontation arranged between the photographic series Ristelhueber made
at the hospital on the reconstructed bodies and Giacometti’s scarified sculptures. In those photographs of faces, as in a series of new images capturing the intensity of Giacometti’s small sculpted heads, Sophie Ristelhueber takes another look at one of the key topics of the modern artist, the ambivalence between life and death in art representation.
Images: Courtesy of GIACOMETTI FOUNDATION, September 23, 2022
Source: GIACOMETTI FOUNDATION
3 bis cour de Rohan, F-75006 Paris
https://www.fondation-giacometti.fr/