The project for a square began in 1929, when Giacometti designed the first of three figures for the de Noailles’ villa in Hyères. He also conceived a set of geometrical figures on a plateau, and from this the actual ‘Projet pour une place’ started to take shape. In his notebooks, the artist drew five elements that evoke myriad associations in the viewer’s mind. As if in a dream, the objects – a cone, a disc, a snake, a stele and a hemisphere – seem merely to hint at an actual function. Their forms oscillate between tangible and abstract, naturally organic and artificially constructed: objects with a character of their own that suddenly form a space in which visitors can immediately rediscover themselves. Dalí’s idea was to embed these approximately human-sized elements in a biomorphic garden landscape, as his sketch ‘Projet pour les Noailles’ (1932/33) reveals. Covering a surface area the size of a pavilion (200 x 317 x 225 cm), the installation was to be located in the walled-off garden at the modernist Villa Noailles in Hyères. It was a collaborative work based on a shared mindset.

The exhibition at the Kunsthaus presents an important group of Surrealist objects by Giacometti, including the ‘Boule suspendue’, a key work from the Basel holdings of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation. A small but select group of paintings by Dalí reminds the visitor of the phantasmagorical visual world for which he is still famous today. Important sketches by Giacometti and Dalí – including a number from the former’s rarely shown ‘carnets’ (sketchbooks) – as well as documents and photographs complement the exhibition, making it a uniquely immersive experience of the creative world of Parisian Surrealism in the early 1930s. For once, Surrealism reveals itself as an artistic movement that, through collaboration between two of its leading exponents, sought large form and open space. The presentation, which was previously shown at the Institut Giacometti in Paris, explores how – thanks to his cooperation with Salvador Dalí – the far-sighted Alberto Giacometti devised a new way of conceiving art: one that viewed the artwork as an object which, when placed in space like an installation, left conventional ideas of sculpture trailing in its wake. It is complemented by the works of other Surrealist artists including Luis Buñuel, René Magritte and Yves Tanguy.

In cooperation with the Fondation Giacometti, Paris.

Supported by Credit Suisse – Partner Kunsthaus Zürich, as well as the Hans Imholz Foundation and the Truus und Gerrit van Riemsdijk Foundation.