This week we visited Gagosian Gallery to see the first-ever exhibition that pairs key works by Alberto Giacometti and Yves Klein. Both artists are generously represented in this immersive installation, which brings together twenty-five of Giacometti's sculputres and many of Klein's Monochromes, Anthropometries and Fire Paintings.

The title of the exhibition, “In Search of the Absolute,” originates from an essay on Giacometti by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre wrote that “Giacometti... is forever beginning anew;” that with each sculpture it is “necessary to start again from zero;” and that Giacometti's images of humanity are “always mediating between nothingness and being.” In the conceptual and working processes of both artists, “nothingness” became “the void,” a space of infinite potential. Giacometti devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning: how to reduce the figure's mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force; while Klein's goal was to reinvest the vacuum of nothingness as a void of “blue profundity.”

In this speculative juxtaposition, “In Search of the Absolute” seeks to evoke the differences as well as the affinities between these two groundbreaking artists of the modern period, bringing new light to their aspirations and achievements.