Aargauer Kunsthaus shows Augusto Giacometti
Published: Thursday, Jan 25th 2024, 11:40
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The exhibition "Augusto Giacometti. Freedom/Commission" at the Aargauer Kunsthaus not only shows works by the artist from the famous artist dynasty. It also looks at the Grisons native's role as a cultural politician.
With his early abstractions, Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947) made a significant contribution to the emergence of modernism in Switzerland, writes the Kunsthaus Aargau in a press release. Augusto was born in Stampa in Bergell and grew up just a few meters away from his cousin Giovanni. He lived in Zurich from 1915, where he frequented the Dadaist circles around Hugo Ball and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
He attracted great attention with a commissioned work for the entrance hall of the police station in Zurich, known to this day as the Giacometti Hall. Augusto Giacometti was one of the first artists in Switzerland to regard painting as autonomous and to venture into non-objectivity. He is considered an important colorist, which can also be seen in his stained glass windows in various churches in Zurich, Frauenfeld and Adelboden.
The exhibition in Aarau therefore focuses on Giacometti's glass and wall paintings as well as his flower paintings. Giacometti demonstrated his "painterly sophistication" with his flower still lifes, which are on display in a separate room. Anyone looking at them can immerse themselves in a "single, intense web of color", the press release continues.
The cycle "Life in the Countryside" from 1920, which originally adorned a private villa in Zurich, is on public display for the first time.
The Aarau exhibition was created in collaboration with the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) in Zurich, according to the Kunsthaus. It is based on the catalog published by SIK-ISEA in autumn 2023, which for the first time systematically recorded "Giacometti's entire painterly oeuvre" with 560 works.
The aim of the exhibition is to make Augusto Giacometti's work accessible to a broad public and at the same time to pay academic tribute to his significance for Swiss art. Among other things, he shaped this as President of the Federal Art Commission.
The exhibition "Augusto Giacometti. Freedom/Commission" at the Aargauer Kunsthaus can be seen from January 27 to May 20.
©Keystone/SDA
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