About the Work
Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures are close and far away at the same time. The material, the bronze, is close; the body – which remains an unfulfilled promise – is out of reach. No matter how close the viewer gets to it, the delicate, fragile figure of the woman with a broken shoulder does not become any more tangible or richer in detail. The distance remains. Giacometti suspended the relativity of location and lent his protagonists an absolute remoteness of the kind we are familiar with from painting, from figures on canvas. We watch his bodies in their incessant process of disappearing.
About the Acquisition
Almost twenty years after it was created, the stark yet fragile bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, the most important Swiss sculptor, was purchased for the Sammlung der Moderne at the Städel Museum. It arrived in Frankfurt am Main in 1987 from the Kunsthandlung Ernst Beyeler, Basel, as a gift of the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (Deutschland) AG. Founded in Zurich in 1856, it was at this time that the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA) - today's Credit Suisse - began to establish itself as a patron of art, among other things. Today the cultural sponsoring by Credit Suisse is concentrated on the fields of classical music, jazz and fine art.
