A new, tranquil, sensory experience of Alberto Giacometti’s world-famous sculptures: that’s what Portuguese artist Rui Chafes offers in Museum Beelden aan Zee in The Hague. The new exhibition Rui Chafes x Alberto Giacometti. Gris, Vide, Cris III is on show until 10 January 2027. It’s the third exhibition in an international series, organised in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
The Portuguese contemporary artist Rui Chafes (1966) was born in the same year in which the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) died. Although both artists are separated by time, place and form language, they share an artistic pursuit: transcendence and making the invisible visible. In their own way the two artists explore how sculpture bears witness to both presence and absence, a tension between body, space and mind. While Giacometti achieves this through a process of reduction, Chafes explores the boundaries of iron.
This exhibition shows the sculptures by both artists for the first time together in the Netherlands. ‘Two grandmasters, together in a unique meeting,’ says Brigitte Bloksma, director of the museum and co-curator of the exhibition. The other co-curator of the exhibition is Helena de Freitas, a renowned Portuguese art historian, art critic and curator. They selected ten sculptures by Giacometti which formed the basis for Chafes’ series of sculptures, some of which were made especially fort he occasion.
The concept of Gris, Vide, Cris – Grey, Emptiness, Scream – is borrowed from a poem by Giacometti and summarizes the thematic core of the special meeting between the two artists. In Chafes’ reading, the grey refers to the moment between visibility and disappearance, the emptiness to the space in which the experience takes shape, and the scream to the intensity of the human experience. The exhibition unfolds in that border area, where Giacometti’s fragile human figures resonate within Chafes’ silent, contemplative world.
It’s an exhibition that not only needs to be seen, but also experienced. La Nuit is one of the high points; Rui Chafes designed this iron structure around Le Nez (1947-50), Giacometti’s first study in plaster, commissioned by the Fondation Giacometti in 2018. The installations Au-delà des yeux and Lumière are also must-sees. In these dark architectural passageways, various sculptures by Giacometti can be viewed in a completely unique way.