Living, Looking, Making: Sculpture by Giacometti, Fontana, Twombly, Serra

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Living, Looking, Making: Sculpture by Giacometti, Fontana, Twombly, Serra at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. Cocurated by Valentina Castellani, Mark Francis, and Véronique Wiesinger, the exhibition brought together works characterized by a combination of authoritative material presence and intimate human scale. As David Sylvester has observed, these sculptures are to do with “living, looking, and making.”

Each artist in the exhibition demonstrates the ability to bring materials to life. Giacometti’s bronze busts and figures retain the fragility of their human models, while Fontana’s metal sculptures combine human and natural structures. The raw physicality and spatial dynamics of Serra’s arrangements in steel and lead establish, for their part, an effective counterpoint with Twombly’s more delicate works in bronze—abstractions that allude to ancient artifacts and mythological themes.

The publication documents the thirty-seven works in the exhibition alongside installation photography and features a new essay on Twombly’s sculptural practice by Francis. It also reproduces (with English translations) handwritten letters by Giacometti and Fontana, and a “verb list” by Serra.