"Reality alone can awaken the eye, tearing it away from its lonely dream, from its vision, to force it into the conscious act of seeing, of gazing."
The Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti is known for his unique sculptures - elongated figures with particularly rough, pitted surfaces. During his time under Antoine Bourdelle, Giacometti discovered the neo-cubist works of Lipchitz, Laurent, Brancusi and Picasso. He then appropriates the cubist principles of geometric deconstruction, which he interprets through a very personal formal vocabulary dominated by the theme of the human figure. Fascinated by Egyptian artefacts, African and Oceanic arts as well as the painting of Paul Cézanne, Giacometti sees art as a means of better understanding reality. Sculpture, for him, "is not an object, it is an interrogation, a question, an answer, it can neither be finished nor perfect".