Rui Chafes X Alberto Giacometti

The international exhibition Rui Chafes X Alberto Giacometti: Gris, Vide, Cris III, brings together the work of the Portuguese artist Rui Chafes with that of the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti. With his impressive installations, Chafes offers a new, tranquil and sensory experience of Giacometti's world-famous sculptures. Gris, Vide, Cris III, the third exhibition in an international series, is being staged by Museum Beelden aan Zee in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. 

Curators: Helena de Freitas and Brigitte Bloksma

The Portuguese contemporary artist Rui Chafes (Lisbon, 1966) was born in the same year in which the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, 1901 – Chur, 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 as well as absence, a tension between body, space, and mind. While Giacometti achieves this through a process of reduction, Chafes explores the boundaries of iron.

A unique meeting
The Rui Chafes X Alberto Giacometti: Gris, Vide, Cris III exhibition, organised in cooperation with the Fondation Giacometti and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, will show the sculptures by both artists for the first time together in the Netherlands. “After the successful Ryan Gander X Edgar Degas exhibition, museum Beelden aan Zee once again has the opportunity to bring two grandmasters together in a unique meeting,” says Brigitte Bloksma, director and co-curator of the exhibition. “The architecture of our museum with the natural play of light forms the ideal space for this encounter. It's an exhibition that not only needs to be seen but also experienced."

Grey, Emptiness, Scream
The concept of Gris, Vide, Cris — Grey, Emptiness, Scream — is borrowed from the poem of the same name 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.

La Nuit
The sculptural work La Nuit is one of the high points of the exhibition; Rui Chafes designed this iron structure around Le Nez (1947–50), Giacometti’s first study in plaster, commissioned by the Fondation Giacometti in 2018. In that year, the first Gris, Vide, Cris exhibition was staged at the French branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti. Five years later, the partnership led to a new exhibition in the main building of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. 

New work
For Gris, Vide, Cris III in Museum Beelden aan Zee, curators Brigitte Bloksma and Helena de Freitas selected ten sculptures by Giacometti which formed the basis for Chafes’ series of sculptures, some of which were made especially for the occasion. Central in the exhibition is not only the body as sculpture, but also its relationship to the space and the viewer. 

A powerful field of tension 
In the interplay between Giacometti and Chafes a statue of a man manifests itself that is as vulnerable as it is timeless. While Giacometti's elongated figures hover between materiality and stillness, Chafes' iron sculptures explore the boundaries between corporeality and emptiness. He invites visitors to enter his works. Au-delà des yeux and Lumière are dark installations containing architectural passageways in which various sculptures by Giacometti can be viewed in a completely different way. With these works, the Portuguese artist shows the human figure as a temporary manifestation in an infinite space. This creates a powerful field of tension between vulnerability and monumentality, and between form and the invisible. 

Thumbnail image: Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman, 1956 © Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris, 2025

Header image: Rui Chafes, La Nuit, 2018 with Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez, 1947-1950. Collection Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris, 2025