My favorite museum gallery of all time is the Giacometti gallery at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen. I love the way the sculptures are installed in relationship to the windows and the landscape beyond them. You are looking at Giacometti and, at the same time, you physically know exactly where you are.
Of course I thought about that gallery when I saw Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur at The Met. Seventeen of Giacometti’s sculptures are installed in and around the Temple of Dendur, a space so familiar and specific that the experience of the sculptures becomes inseparable from the place where you are seeing them. Giacometti was deeply influenced by ancient Egyptian art, which makes the placement particularly meaningful.
It is a small exhibition and a short one, open only through September 8. I love the opportunity to see work I know in a completely different context and to consider how much where we see something changes what we see.
Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York. Through September 8, 2026.
