As this book explains Giacometti spent his life, exorcising this existential and formal void through a return to the human figure. The question that dominated his work was how to restore in art the sense of the presence of the being in space. Giacometti sought tirelessly to establish his contingent volume, which became increasingly slender and threadlike, and to seize its finiteness in a reality, however banal it might be. He began to develop heads and nudes modeled in the void, in that experience of nothingness that opposed his quest for the absolute, a metaphor of the human condition.
As this book explains Giacometti spent his life, exorcising this existential and formal void through a return to the human figure. The question that dominated his work was how to restore in art the sense of the presence of the being in space. Giacometti sought tirelessly to establish his contingent volume, which became increasingly slender and threadlike, and to seize its finiteness in a reality, however banal it might be. He began to develop heads and nudes modeled in the void, in that experience of nothingness that opposed his quest for the absolute, a metaphor of the human condition.