Key Visual of "Alberto Giacometti – Unveiled Surrealism"
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI – UNVEILED SURREALISM
Exhibition from September 1, 2024 until January 15, 2025
The Max Ernst Museum Brühl of the LVR is dedicating a major exhibition to Swiss sculptor, painter, and draughtsman Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966). Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, the exhibition offers a unique perspective on Giacometti’s work, explored here through the lens of Surrealism and for the first time, highlights the artist’s friendship and creative ties with Max Ernst.
The work of Alberto Giacometti is among the most original artistic creations of the modern period. Known for his elongated and expressive sculptures created after the Second World War, Giacometti also produced a significant body of highly inventive and psychologically charged works in the 1930s, at a time when he was actively involved in the Surrealist circles in Paris.
On the occasion of Surrealism’s centennial, the exhibition presents Giacometti's works from that period, testifying to the artist’s interest in the unconscious, aggressive and sexual impulses, and the ambiguity of signs. The exhibition looks at the ways in which a surrealist “spirit” endures in Giacometti’s production after his break with the movement in 1935 and his later works of the post-war years. It also explores moments of friendship and creative affinity between Giacometti and Max Ernst, who met in 1929 in Paris, worked in neighbouring studios in the 1930s, and remained friends thereafter.
The exhibition presents over 70 works—sculptures, drawings, paintings, and prints—by Giacometti, featuring several of his major sculptures such as The Couple (1926), Spoon Woman (1927), Suspended Ball (1930), Disagreeable Object (1931), The Nose (1949), and The Cage (first version) (1949–1950). The exhibition will also display works by Ernst in dialogue with Giacometti’s, as well as photographs and archives underscoring the ties between the two artists.
Accompanying it is a richly illustrated trilingual catalog featuring contributions by Laura Braverman, Madeleine Frey, Friederike Voßkamp, and Jürgen Wilhelm. Curated by Dr. Friederike Voßkamp, Head of Collection of the Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR and Laura Braverman, Associate Curator at the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.
Further information:
www.maxernstmuseum.lvr.de
and
www.fondation-giacometti.fr
Anne Horel, Burger Fern, 2024, Digital Collage
HYPERCREATURES
Exhibition from March until October 2025
Since the beginning of the 20th century at the latest, hybridisations of materials and motifs have been one of the defining processes in the visual arts. For his surrealist collages created from 1922 onwards, Max Ernst used scissors and a scalpel to dismantle images of human and non-human bodies and assemble them into new creatures.
The international group exhibition Hypercreatures at the Max Ernst Museum Brühl of the LVR sheds light on the significance of the fundamental image-making processes of surrealism for contemporary art. With a view to social changes or current developments in science and technology, around 20 contemporary artists are showing hybrid creatures that combine elements of humans, animals, machines and plants. These hyper-creatures stand for a new understanding of identity, difference and culture.
Subject to change!