From Dec. 13, 2025 to March 28, 2026, the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in St. Moritz presents Alberto Giacometti: Faces and Landscapes of Home, an exhibition with an intimate character that brings together portraits dedicated to the artist’s family members and alpine views of Stampa and Maloja, the remote places in the Bergell Valley to which he returned throughout his life. Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures and drawings that explore Giacometti’s deep connection with the figures closest to his heart, such as his parents, brother Diego and wife Annette, along with the landscapes that shaped his youthful imagination. The itinerary is enriched by photographs by Ernst Scheidegger, a close friend and collaborator of the artist since 1943, who has long documented his life and work.
Alberto Giacometti ’s research developed between two distinct universes: the Swiss high valley of his childhood and the frenetic Paris of the avant-garde. Stampa, with its steep slopes and closed horizons, was one of the places of his first artistic discoveries related to light, the human face and landscape.
Born in 1901 in Val Bregaglia to Annetta and Giovanni Giacometti, a celebrated Swiss modern painter known for his luminous Alpine scenery, Alberto grew up immersed in art from an early age. The works on display created between 1918 and the 1920s testify to his early focus on the figure, with delicate portraits of his parents executed when he was seventeen and drawings of the local mountains anticipating themes destined to return throughout his career. Although initially influenced by his father’s postimpressionist tendencies, Giacometti’s language evolved rapidly. This is evidenced by an important self-portrait from 1920 and the painting Monte del Forno (1923), where the artist combines the compositional solidity of Cézannewith the monumental approach of Ferdinand Hodler. Eager, however, to break free from what he perceived as an overly provincial legacy, he moved to Paris in 1922, driven by a need for autonomy.
In the French capital, Giacometti immersed himself in the heart of theavant-garde, experimenting with different languages and approaches. Applying the Cézanne method to sculpture soon showed its limitations, and in the numerous Alpine drawings of 1922-23 the artist highlighted the inner tension between painting and three-dimensionality. His researches led him from Cubism to tribal and archaic sculpture to Surrealism, marking a departure from his beginnings and paving the way for the famous threadlike and material figures that interrogate the human condition in space.
During World War II, Giacometti returned to Switzerland, settling in Geneva, and then returned to Paris at the end of the conflict. He continued to work, however, in his Stampa and Maloja studios, where he tirelessly portrayed his mother, Diego and Annette, while consolidating his artistic vision. Bronze sculptures such as Tête au long cou (ca. 1949) and Buste de Diego (ca. 1954) reflect the continuing dialogue between the cosmopolitan Parisian dimension and the intimacy of his origins.
While the Parisian studio was a pulsating center of meetings and conversations, Stampa remained a private refuge, a place of reading, meditation and silent work. The two worlds rarely touched each other, but one figure connected them: Ernst Scheidegger. His photographs, many featured in the exhibition, penetrate the artist’s domestic atmosphere, capturing moments of concentration at the easel, everyday gestures with Annette and her mother, and the quiet of familiar rooms.
In the last two decades of his life, repeated returns to Val Bregaglia, motivated by his mother’s decline and increasing physical frailty, revived his creative energy. Drawings and paintings from that era show an artist returning, both in vision and themes, to the places that had shaped him, confirming the centrality of the sense of home in his work. Scheidegger’s images from the 1950s and 1960s also depict the landscapes of the Bergell and Engadine: mountains, paths and the shifting light that defined Giacometti’s deep rootedness in his land.
Juxtaposed with the artist’s own works, these photographs build a visual bridge between Giacometti’s public and private dimensions, between the Montparnasse modernist and the son of the Alps.
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| Hauser & Wirth in St. Moritz explores Giacometti's connection to the figures and landscapes he loved most |
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