Giacometti drew and sculpted the people close to him again and again. Caroline was a friend of the artist who sat for him almost every night between 9pm and around midnight for over four years. These paintings evoke the intensity of the relationship between artist and sitter within the confined space of the studio. In this image, Caroline is painted from close-up which allows her face to dominate the canvas. Giacometti’s drawings reveal the concerted energy with which he worked: he mapped out his subject and then through the rapid application of strokes, constantly altering and rebuilding, he constructed a complicated network of lines. The layering of paint causes the heavily reworked facial area to stand out in relief from the paper which buckles beneath its weight. Caroline’s face becomes the focus of his activity and bears the traces of this constant revision. Thin vertical and horizontal lines divide the sitter’s features into symmetrical zones while the rapidly applied lines appear like contours around her face. Heavy rings encircle her eyes, making them the focus of the image as she returns the viewer’s gaze with intensity.
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Caroline was a friend of the artist who sat for him almost every night between 9pm and around midnight for over four years. These paintings evoke the intensity of the relationship between artist and sitter within the confined space of the studio. In this image, Caroline is painted from close-up which allows her face to dominate the canvas.
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Seated Man depicts his brother Diego, one of Giacometti’s most frequent models, but even this familiar face became an object of investigation and discovery for the artist, who commented ‘When he poses for me I don’t recognise him’.
Gallery label, July 2012 |