Alberto Giacometti was born in the little village of Borgonovo in the Swiss canton of Grisons on October 10, 1901. He spent his first school years in the neighboring village of Stampa. Under the instructions of his father Giovanni Giacometti, Alberto painted and made models. Shortly before graduating from secondary school, Giacometti dropped out of school in 1919 to fully dedicate himself to art. From 1919 to 1920 the artist attended the Geneva 'Kunstgewerbeschule'. After a prolonged stay in Italy, Giacometti went to Paris in 1922 to study at the 'Académie de la Grande Chaumière' under Bourdelle, by whom he was inspired greatly as an artist until 1925. After archaic beginnings, which were marked by elemental power, he got closer to the Surrealist movement, which he joined from 1930 to 1935. During this time he created 'Objets' and various literary contributions to Surrealist journals. The extreme overextension of his later characters are already hinted at in his spacial constructions. >From 1945 he created fragile, almost bodyless bronze statues, whose fragility was intensified by the comparatively compact foundations Giacometti used as a base for his figures. The relationship between figure and space became the core element: The striding or standing figures find themselves in emptyness and isolation. In this intensive-subjective representation, an existential exposure and angst based on the immediacy of the moment is hinted at. To many they are a reflection of the spiritual situation of the time. Just like his sculptures, Giacometti's drawings and paintings depict the lost human being in the emptyness of space with great intensity and sensibility. The formal characteristics are a graphic network of lines, with which Giacometti extracted volumes from areas, and an almost monochrome color scheme used in his paintings. From 1953 he produced prints, some of which appeared in books. Giacometti spent the war years in Geneva. In 1945 he returned to Paris where he lived and worked until he died in 1966. In 1961 the artist received an award from the Carnegie Foundation Pittsburg, in 1962 he received the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale and in 1964 the Guggenheim Prize for Painting. His unmistakable works are present in all the world's major collections, representing art in the mid 20th century in an exemplary way.