Swiss-born sculptor Giacometti studied art in Geneva, moving to Paris in 1922 where he experimented with Cubism and became interested in primitive sculpture. He worked with the surrealist group until the mid-1930s, producing strange objects suggestive of cruelty, sex and dreams. After that time, he broke away dramatically from the Surrealists and returned to working from life. He then produced his best known works, a series of elongated and fragile skeletal figures, made not by carving but by an obsessive process of modelling in clay and whittling away.
A term for art that refers to the representation of the human figure, however, altered or distorted. It is often applied to paintings and sculptures made after twentieth-century abstraction that re-introduced elements of the human body into abstract styles, including work by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud.