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International Journal of
Humanities and Social Science Research
ARCHIVES
VOL. 12, ISSUE 4 (2026)
Reconstructing form and void: A study of existential notions in Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture
Authors
Paramita Chakraborty
Abstract
This essay studies the development of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture within the changing relationship among shape, space, and the human state. Beginning with his early training under Bourdelle and his experience with Brancusi, it traces his ongoing engagement with Surrealism and the development of a distinctive artistic morphology. He expressed a sustained exploration of the human look through deformation, fragmentation, and diminution of traditional forms. It is also important to note that Art is intensely bonded with the humanities and social sciences because it reveals human experiences, disposition, and social realities. Artists react to the sociocultural, historical, and cognitive contexts of their time through their artistic practice. Giacometti’s work, notably, proposes a path to question human presence, seclusion, insight, and the conditions of the present era. The study explores the impact of primeval art, natural surroundings, and the unconscious on Giacometti’s practice. Works such as Spoon Woman, The Couple, Suspended Ball, The Palace at 4 A.M., and Woman with Her Throat Cut demonstrate how a contour of a sculpture becomes associated with emotional stress, longing, motion, and dream. His departure from the Surrealist group in 1935 marked a major shift, although Surrealist notions still reverberated in his later oeuvre. His post-war sculptures receive particular focus, in which seclusion, estrangement, tenuousness, and increasingly ambiguous contemplation shape the human figure. Works such as Invisible Object, Head of a Man on a Rod, City Square, The Chariot, and The Forest transformed into a delicate presence suspended between life, reality, survival, and closure. Although Giacometti rejected Sartrean existentialism, his work engaged greatly with uncertainties of life, death, love, and human loneliness, making form and the abyss vigorous expressions of the unstable landscape of human existence.
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Pages:87-90
How to cite this article:
Paramita Chakraborty "Reconstructing form and void: A study of existential notions in Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture". International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research, Vol 12, Issue 4, 2026, Pages 87-90

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Reconstructing form and void: A study of existential notions in Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture | International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research