Giacometti in the Tanks @ Tate Modern

The exhibition of a dozen Giacometti sculptures in the former oil tanks underneath Tate Modern is an exquisite display of his work. The experience of being in these haunting dark spaces is breathtaking. I have seen Giacometti's men walking, women standing, their bodies trapped by the intensity of their material, in memorable settings. At the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen and here in Paris at the Montparnasse atelier being stand out displays of the emaciated, elongated bronzes. But the fragility and vulnerability of misshapen bodies so beautifully articulated by sparse lighting and hard concrete walls in the depths of Tate Modern took them to another level. 

I thought I would pop in to see these familiar works on my way out of the Mendieta exhibition, but I was so entranced by the quiet reflection, the delicacy of Giacometti's figures that I struggled to leave them. So much of the tone of the exhibition is in the chiaroscuro lighting, as if the bronze figures are shyly hiding underneath the great bulwark of a building. They are frail and vulnerable, misshapen, some even missing limbs, and their shadows distorted against the industrial walls of the oil tanks, hardened concrete with its own variations in wear and tear. Interestingly, contrary to Tate's website, I didn't think they evoked the isolation and alienation of Giacometti sculptures in other settings. Rather, they were resilient, quietly reflecting on their entrapment, enclosed by the darkness of shadow. 

The tanks were constructed for oil storage when the  building was a power station. The subterranean spaces are everything that a gallery with windows looking out to Millennium Park in Chicago are not. While Giacometti's figures are often surrounded by windows to accentuate their motion, in the underground world of the Blatnavik building, it is their stasis, their inward reflection and contemplation on their incarceration that is emphasised, making their weakness all the more apparent. This is a masterful instance of curation.