LONDON.- Through a group of sculptures made in the 1950s, Giacometti – Smith, on public display at Ordovas from 6 February until 11 April 2015, presents the works of two giants of 20th century sculpture, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and David Smith (1906-1965), side by side. These two, very different, contemporaries who both lived and worked in a kind of self-imposed isolation at the same time, but on different sides of the Atlantic, were arguably the foremost pioneers of modern sculpture in Europe and America during the immediate post-war era.

While Alberto Giacometti endlessly explored a highly singular, strongly material and strictly figurative image of man by working directly from a small group of sitters in a tiny studio in the middle of post-war Paris, David Smith set up an industrial shop in the remote Adirondack town of Bolton Landing in upstate New York. There, in a series of equally totemic metal sculptures, Smith literally forged an entirely new language of form by fusing an understanding of the American landscape tradition with innovations of the first generation of European Modernists, among them the ‘drawing in space’ established by Pablo Picasso and Julio González in their sculptures of the 1930s, and aspects of Giacometti’s Surrealist works.

Often compared with New York School contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman, Smith’s work opened the door for a generation of sculptors who followed, including John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra. In Europe, Alberto Giacometti’s dogged determination to pursue a demonstrably elusive image of man throughout the years of post-war trauma made him a hero not just for the Existentialist avant-garde in Paris but also for an entire generation of younger European artists still clinging to the figurative tradition - among them Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

This exhibition features two sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Femme de Venise IX, conceived in 1956, and Trois hommes qui marchent, conceived in 1948, alongside three sculptures by David Smith, Anchorhead, 1952, Untitled and Forging VI, both executed in 1955.