With its rough, rippling surface and powerfully sculpted form, Alberto Giacometti’s Le Nez is unabashedly about aggression. The figure’s Pinocchio-like nose pushes past the cage from which it is suspended, claiming the space around it. And yet for all its strength, there is something achingly fragile about this work. It hangs delicately from a thread, and at the base of that powerful head is an impossibly slender neck, smaller than the nose’s root. He suggests, through this tension, all the drama of the human condition: the anxiety, vulnerability and alienation at the heart of the existential experience. Included in the historic Macklowe Collection, Sotheby’s is proud to offer Alberto Giacometti’s Le Nez on 15 November 2021.
The Macklowe Collection: Simon Shaw on Giacometti's Le Nez
New York | 15 November
