Alberto Giacometti

Born in Switzerland in 1901, Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922 and spent years working through Cubism and Surrealism before abandoning both around 1935 to focus on the human figure. Between 1938 and 1944, his sculptures shrank to a maximum of seven centimeters - he was trying to capture the actual distance between himself and his model, and the forms kept collapsing inward. After World War II came the work that defined him: those extreme, skeletal figures stretched impossibly tall and thin, caught in a space he described as imaginary yet real, tangible yet out of reach. He also painted, especially after 1957, in an austere near-monochrome style that owed nothing to the trends around him. He wrote constantly in notebooks, exhibition texts, diaries - always circling his own self-doubt, the terror that he could never close the distance between vision and execution. He died in 1966, still caught in that space.