Giacometti Center celebrates friendship between artist and Soshana, Austrian Jewish painter

The Giacometti Center in Stampa, Canton Grisons, Switzerland, is hosting from July 4 to August 29, 2021 the exhibition The Faces of Soshana and Giacometti. Memory, Absence, Trauma, curated by Virginia Marano. More than 30 works, including drawings and paintings, celebrate the work of Austrian painter Soshana on this occasion, as well as the latter’s friendship with Alberto Giacometti.

Soshana (Vienna, 1927 - 2009), an artist with an intense and dramatic life, was born in Vienna in 1927 under the name Susanne Schüller; she was forced to emigrate to America because of Nazi racial laws, as she was Jewish. In Paris, in the 1950s, she uses as her studio the spaces that were once Derain’s and Gauguin’s; in the French capital she has the opportunity to meet artists such as Brâncusi, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Picasso, intellectuals such as Sartre, and Alberto Giacometti, with whom a deep friendship was born.

Called the Cassandra of the canvas by the Parisian press, she was an exile artist and free painter. The public will be able to learn about her art through nine works on paper, twenty-seven canvases, including a famous portrait of the Swiss artist, titled Giacometti (1962), and part of the epistolary between Giacometti and Soshana, from the collection of Amos Schueller, the artist’s son.

The works in the exhibition investigate the relationship between space, history, gender and sexuality in which the connection to Giacometti’s work is manifested in the figurative study placed in an imaginary space. A gallery of portraits, faces, subtle figures leaning against dark curtains or projected onto golden backgrounds, and which can be divided into three groups: the first includes the portrait of Isaku Yanaihara-Japanese philosopher of reference for Giacometti, which represents a reflection on the role of memory; the second, in which the portrayed faces recall the sculptor’s profile and emphasize the meeting between the two artists, concerns the mystery ofabsence; and the third is dedicated to the trauma of war, in which the continuous exile experienced by the Jewish artist is evoked.

The exhibition intends to document the yet little explored relationship of friendship between the two artists and recount their common search for the absolute understood as the possibility of rendering the visible, from an artistic point of view.

The Faces of Soshana and Giacometti is organized by the Friends of the Giacometti Center, with loans from Amos Schueller (Vienna), and is supported by the Municipality of Bregaglia, the Friends of the Giacometti Center, the Giacometti Center Foundation, the Graubünden Culture Office/Swisslos, and the Maloja Region. The installation is by Studio Alder Clavuot Nunzi Architekten GmbH ETH SIA.

For more info: www.centrogiacometti.ch/it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to noon and 3 to 5 p.m.

Tickets: Adults 5 CHF. Free for children under 16 and Friends of the Giacometti Center.

Image: Soshana with Cheongsam in Paris (1957)

Giacometti Center celebrates friendship between artist and Soshana, Austrian Jewish painter

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