Alberto Giacometti was an internationally acclaimed painter and sculptor of the 20th century and the Solomon R. Guggenheim held a retrospective of his prolific work in 2018. This was a complex exhibition that featured both paintings and sculptures. Thus, there were many spatial challenges, from how to present both art forms together to dealing with the small sizes of Giacometti’s busts.

I joined the show at its very beginning, so I started by making thorough research on the artist, so as to make different design proposals to discuss with my supervisor and the curators of the show. All of the options were inspired by the artist’s struggle ‘to fit into space’ (in his own words) and his personal obsession on how to deal with mass. The intimate character of his works, most of which portray his closest relations, were also considered, as well as the loneliness and melancholy they helplessly evoke. An obsessive artist as he was, his works deal repeatedly with the same models in order to achieve Giacometti’s own real perception of them, so the exhibition also needed to find the right balance between the similarity of the artworks and their individuality, which lays on subtle details that can only be grasped if being able to come close to the artwork. Therefore, an intimate tete-a-tete between the viewer and the piece of art were attempted in my sketches.

As I myself could witness almost two years after I finished my internship, the similarities between the final result of the exhibition and the ideas I provided at the  very beginning are easily noticeable.