Alberto Giacometti: Faces and Landscapes of Home. An Intimate Exhibition of Faces, Mountains and Memory in St. Moritz

This winter, Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz presents Alberto Giacometti: Faces and Landscapes of Home, an exhibition that brings the Swiss artist back to the places that shaped him: Stampa and Maloja, in the remote Bregaglia Valley.

Alberto Giacometti at his worktable in Stampa, 1964 © Succession Alberto Giacometti / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the show brings together paintings, sculptures and drawings that reveal Giacometti’s profound bond with his family and with the Alpine landscape of his childhood. It is a return to origins that is not only geographical, but also emotional and creative.

Alongside Giacometti’s works, the exhibition includes photographs by Ernst Scheidegger—his close friend and lifelong companion—who, from the 1940s to the 1960s, documented the artist’s everyday life between Paris and Switzerland. Scheidegger’s images reveal a quieter, almost domestic side of Giacometti: moments at the easel, silent exchanges with his mother or his wife Annette, contemplative pauses inside the house-studio in Stampa.

Giacometti grew up in the Bregaglia Valley in a family immersed in art: his father Giovanni was one of Switzerland’s leading modern painters, famed for his luminous Alpine scenes. It is no surprise, then, that Alberto’s earliest subjects in the 1910s and ’20s were his parents and the surrounding landscape. These early sketches—both austere and intimate—already define the central themes of his future research: the human figure, light, and the observation of reality.

Alberto Giacometti Monte del Forno 1923 Oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm Private Collection, Switzerland © Succession Alberto Giacometti / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

In 1922, the artist moved to Paris, determined to free himself from a tradition he felt too constraining. There he encountered the avant-garde: Cubism, tribal art, Surrealism. He experimented, questioned himself, and changed direction. But as the exhibition shows, his connection to Switzerland never broke. During the Second World War he returned to work in Geneva, and throughout his life he made frequent returns to Stampa and Maloja—places where he obsessively portrayed those closest to him: his mother, Diego, Annette. These figures would eventually become true archetypes of his sculpture.

The exhibition features finely modelled bronze works such as Tête au long cou and Petite buste de Diego, shown alongside late drawings of the mountains he visited throughout his life. These works testify to a constant dialogue between departure and return, between cosmopolitan Paris and the intimate refuge of the Alps.

Scheidegger’s photographs enrich this narrative, capturing the daily rhythm of Giacometti’s life: a restless, urban artist, yet also a son of the mountains—bound to that landscape by a deep and almost secret sense of belonging.

Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz

Via Serlas 22, 7500 St. Moritz

Date

13 dicembre 2025 – 28 marzo 2026