Giacometti, Alberto

Swiss sculptor and painter. In the 1940s, he developed a highly original style, creating thin, rough-textured single figures in bronze. These emaciated figures have often been seen as an expression of the acute sense of alienation of people in the modern world. Man Pointing (1947) is one of many examples in the Tate Gallery, London.

His first works show the strong influence of surrealism, as in The Palace at 4 am 1932 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a fantastic cage reminiscent of a stage set. During his surrealist phase in the 1930s he briefly experimented with kinetic sculpture (see kinetic art. After 1945 he worked mainly on his attenuated single figures and busts, works which express the way in which an object is transformed by perception. This obsession with the ever-changing nature of perception is also evident in his drawings and paintings, in which haunting, disembodied images emerge from a dense network of fine, tentative marks.