Giacometti – Nauman: Kat. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Alberto Giacometti (1901 1966) and Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) both lived during times of cultural crisis and turmoil Giacometti experiencing the crippling effects of two world wars and Nauman, the birth of the Cold War, surveillance and the rise of technology. The surprising and hitherto overlooked connections between the works of these two artists from two different generations are the subject of both the current Schirn Kunsthalle exhibition and its accompanying catalog. Both Nauman's and Giacometti's oeuvres revolve primarily around the image of man and the human condition. With reduced means of representation, each artist explores fundamental existential questions: the emptiness, the relationship between figure and space, and the fragmented body. Illustrated with over 200 color plates, this critical hardcover publication features essays by critic, curator and painter Robert Storr, art historian Thierry Dufr.ne, cultural historian and sound art curator Gaby Hartel and exhibition curator Esther Schlicht, all of whom expand our perception of the significant commonalities in the work of these outstanding representatives of 20th- and 21st-century art. Giacometti emerges as a pioneer of key developments in art after 1960, regaining his original radicalism, while Nauman continues his outstanding importance as a sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist of behavioral and psychological encoding. Seen together they achieve an alternative historical significance.