In turn, sculpture, being a static object, was used as a means by which to discover how timed photographic exposure could reveal its subject differently. From a fixed viewpoint, the camera lens directs, freezes, and manipulates the appearance of three-dimensional objects.

Photography has become part of sculpture itself sculptors such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, and Medardo Rosso, for example, used it as a developmental tool for their work, producing images that created dramatic new interplays of light and perspective. Since then, the two mediums-ancient and modern-have become deeply enmeshed. The impulse to photograph sculpture harks back to the mid-nineteenth century, with the advent of photography itself. Often considered as testimony to the ravages of postwar Europe, Giacometti’s art has a timeless, perpetual quality, even as it continues to inflect art historical narratives. In Femme assise (1956), the folded arms and mottled head of a female figure seem to signify forbearance and resignation, the form as gestural as it is abstract. In his attenuated, elegiac figures-here spanning the period from 1919 through 1965-a sense of mortality clashes with vivid embodiment, figuration becomes existential, and a suffocating compression opens onto both urgency and contemplation. Exemplified by the cast bronze Diane Bataille (1947), Giacometti’s oeuvre is at once conceptual and emotional, anonymous and specific, archaic and modern. His highly distinctive entities, molded in plaster or cast in bronze, charge the spatial voids that surround them. Giacometti’s work presents an unprecedented visual discourse on the figure and its relation to space. In 2016, Lindbergh was invited to photograph bronzes and plasters by Giacometti held in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich-the largest and most important collection of Giacometti works in a museum-including 150 sculptures, as well as key paintings and drawings. Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, together with photographs by Peter Lindbergh. You might discover something much larger than yourself. Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. So it is important to fashion one’s work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life. All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces.

Peter lindbergh shadows on the wall