Swiss born Giacometti (1901-1966) lived and worked in Paris for some forty years, and in recognition of his contribution to art received the Grand Prix National des Arts (National Grand Prize for Letters) in 1965. Primarily known for his sculptures, he was also a painter, illustrator, and printmaker whose early influences included Abstraction and Surrealism. After the Second World War he sought inspiration from the philosophy of Existentialism, through which he examined the burdens of post-war anxiety, trauma, and loneliness. Yet we also see in his body of work from this post-war period to his death in 1966, an increasingly wide interest in phenomenology – a sub-branch of philosophy that in common with existentialism considers the subjective nature of conscious lived experience, thus questioning what it means to be human. This shift in focus also enabled Giacometti to explore in more depth ideas of sensory and spatial perception that had preoccupied him for some time. Experimental in approach and driven by a restless impulse to overwork his clay, Giacometti is perhaps most known for his tall and slender figurative pieces. These figures expose the inhumanity of mankind following the atrocities of World War Two and the consequences of the atomic age, and capture the breadth of societal angst and alienation.

It is in this context that Project for a Place stands out in Giacometti’s oeuvre due to its departure from his typical subjects, and as such should be seen as one of his great lost monuments from this transitionally creative period. Conceived in 1946, Project for a Place was completed in the same year as Project for a Monument in Memory of Gabriel Peri, with each work alluding to the devastation engendered by modern warfare. Gabriel Péri, a French Communist journalist, politician, and member of the French Resistance had been arrested by the Germans in May 1941 and was killed with other hostages in December of the same year. Péri was immortalised in Louis Aragon’s poem ‘La Légende de Gabriel Péri’ and celebrated as a hero. Project pour une Place was directly connected to the commemorative monument Giacometti envisioned for Péri, albeit this was never realised, evidence of which can be seen in Giacometti’s notebooks. Importantly, these two works are indicative of a milestone for the artist as they explore iconic motifs that foreground the evolution of Giacometti’s artistic and intellectual vision during the watershed year of 1946. Yet it is Project for a Place, specifically, that calls to mind questions of solitude and contemplation in its timeless evocation of memory, silence, and memorialisation. As such, this sculpture is a perfect example of Giacometti’s great skill in examining multiple complimentary but complex narratives, centred as they were on contemporary social anxieties in the climate of post-war Europe and his subsequent rendering of fragility and strength, life and death. Project for a Place demonstrates his fascination with, and manipulation of, scale depicting as it does a towering gravestone behind the twisted, almost serpentine tree branches located at its base. The sculpture also functions as an intimate portrayal of loss and regeneration through its juxtaposition of a felled tree against its living counterpart. The monumentality of Giacometti’s exploration of scale in this extraordinary sculpture is second only to the weight with which his subject matter should be understood in this defining year.

Giacometti’s first retrospectives were held in 1955 in the United States, Britain and Germany, and only a year later his work was exhibited at the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale and at the Kunsthalle in Bern. He exhibited in Tokyo, at the Minami Gallery in 1958 and was invited back to the Venice Biennale in 1962 with a personal exhibition, winning the grand prize for sculpture. In the same year a major retrospective of his work was held at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Giacometti received the Guggenheim International Prize for Painting in January 1964, and held three retrospectives in 1965 in London at the Tate Gallery, in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, and in Humlebaek, Denmark at the Louisiana Museum. The first French retrospective of his work was held at the Orangerie des Tuileries posthumously in 1969.