Alberto Giacometti

Faces and Landscapes of Home

13 DECEMBER 2025 – 28 MARCH 2026

ST. MORITZ

Opening Reception

13 December, 6 – 8pm

Dates

13 December 2025 – 28 March 2026

Materials

Press Release (En)

Artwork Inquiry

‘Alberto Giacometti. Faces and Landscapes of Home’ is a deeply personal exhibition devoted to the artist’s intimate portrayals of his family and the alpine surroundings of his native Stampa and Maloja, located in the remote Bregaglia Valley, to which he returned to throughout his life.

Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the exhibition gathers paintings, sculptures and drawings that focus on Giacometti’s lifelong engagement with those closest to him—his parents, his brother Diego and wife Annette—as well as the landscapes that shaped his early background. These portraits and views of home reveal, like no other body of work, the intensity and psychological depth that define Giacometti’s approach to representation.

The exhibition is enriched by photographs by Ernst Scheidegger, Giacometti’s close friend and collaborator, who first met the artist in 1943 and documented his life and work over several decades.

Giacometti’s artistic practice emerged between two worlds: the high mountain valley of his Swiss childhood and the restless metropolis of Paris. Stampa, with its steep slopes and narrow horizons, offered some of his first encounters with people, light and landscape. Born in 1901 in the Bregaglia Valley to Annetta and Giovanni Giacometti—one of Switzerland’s leading modern painters, renowned for his luminous Alpine scenes—Alberto was immersed in art from a young age. Early works on view from 1918 through the 1920s reveal his early fascination with the human form. Tender sketches of his mother and father, made when he was just 17, alongside drawings of local landscapes—at once austere and intimate—establish the subjects that would remain a quiet, lifelong source of inspiration.

Drawing from his father’s post-impressionist influences, Giacometti’s artistic language would continue to evolve. This is evident in a significant early self-portrait from 1920 and a painting of the local mountain scene ‘Monte del Forno’ (1923), where the young artist fused the structural clarity of Paul Cézanne with the monumental gestures of Ferdinand Hodler. Yet, Giacometti was determined to escape what he considered a provincial legacy and, seeking independence, he left for Paris in 1922.

In Paris, Giacometti reinvented himself at the heart of the avant-garde. The Cézannean model, when applied to sculpture, soon reached its limits, and in numerous mountain drawings of 1922–23, the artist grappled with a pressing inner conflict: whether he should be a painter or a sculptor. Giacometti’s immersion into the current trends of avantgarde sculpture during the 1920s and ‘30s soon carried him far away from his beginnings toward cubism, tribal and archaic art and, finally, surrealism. His decisive turn towards sculpture would eventually lead him to the creation of his visionary elongated, textured figures, focusing on a deepened analysis of figuration and existential questions of the human psyche represented in three-dimensional space.

During the Second World War, Giacometti retreated to Switzerland, living in Geneva and returning to Paris again once the war had ended. During this period, he continued to visit and work in his Stampa studio and Maloja, incessantly portraying those dearest to him—his mother, his brother Diego and his wife Annette (whom he married in 1949)—whilst honing his singular artistic vision. Bronze sculptures of Diego, such as ‘Tête au long cou (Head with Long Neck)’ (ca. 1949) and ‘Petite buste de Diego (Small Bust of Diego)’ (1954), together with tender works on paper of his wife and mother embody the dialogue between departure and return, between cosmopolitan Paris and the rooted intimacy of home.

While his Paris studio buzzed with visitors, Stampa remained a private sanctuary where he read, sketched and reflected in solitude. The two realms seldom intersected, yet one figure bridged them: photographer Ernst Scheidegger. Granted rare access to the artist’s private world in Stampa and Maloja, Scheidegger’s images, several of which are included in the exhibition, go beyond documentation. They capture the textureof Giacometti’s daily life—moments of concentration at the easel, quiet exchanges with Annette and his mother, and the contemplative atmosphere of domestic interiors.

These frequent returns in the last two decades of his life, prompted by his mother’s aging and his own declining health, brought renewed creative energy. His mountain drawings show an artist both visually and thematically returning to the landscapes that first shaped him. These late drawings and paintings testify to his enduring commitment to observation and form, and to the constant of home in Giacometti’s career.

Scheidegger’s photographs from the 1950s and ‘60s also trace the landscapes of the Bregaglia and Engadin valleys—the mountains, paths and changing light that defined Giacometti’s enduring sense of place. Together with the works on view by Giacometti, the exhibition forms a visual bridge between the artist’s public and private selves: between the modernist of Montparnasse and the son of the Alps.

‘It was very cold in St. Moritz, colder than in Maloja, but beautiful. Here, it is much brighter than in Stampa, which is the first thing that stands out; there is a big difference. (...) I feel like I’m still up there, so I can’t say anything more except that I felt good and I liked it a lot. I really hope to be able to come back in the spring, when I’ll try to take a more of a vacation and work a little less.’—Letter to Annetta Giacometti from Alberto Giacometti, 14 December 1946

Alberto Giacometti and Ernst Scheidegger:
A Shared Vision

Giacometti's Paris studio was visited each year by an ever-increasing number of photographers and admirers and thus served as the artist's window onto the world, his Bregaglia home and studio remained private.

There was one exception however: Ernst Scheidegger. The friendship between Alberto Giacometti and the Swiss photographer Scheidegger began in 1943 in the Engadine, a time when the artist, living in Geneva during the war years, often returned to the alpine valleys of his childhood. From this encounter grew a bond of trust that would prove unique in Giacometti’s life.

While other photographers could only capture the elusive Giacometti in his Paris studio or in his self-portraits, Scheidegger was welcomed into the artist’s private world. For decades he remained the only photographer who was granted intimate access to the family home in Stampa and studio in nearby Maloja, and to the circle of family and friends who populated Giacometti’s everyday life.