Met Museum To Stage Giacometti Show In Temple Of Dendur This Summer

This summer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will place 17 sculptures by Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) inside the Temple of Dendur, turning an ancient Egyptian monument into the setting for a tightly focused encounter between antiquity and modernism. The exhibition, titled“Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur,” opens June 12 and will be on view in a venue that rarely hosts exhibitions of any kind.

The installation is modest in scale but ambitious in intent. Fourteen of the works come from the Fondation Giacometti, with the remaining pieces drawn from the Met's own collection. Among the highlights are“Walking Woman (I)” from 1932, which will stand in the temple's offering hall, and“Women of Venice” from 1956, which will be shown on the terrace.

The choice of site is central to the project. The Temple of Dendur dates to around 10 BCE and has been on view at the Met since 1978, long after Giacometti's death. Yet the museum is framing the exhibition as a way to illuminate the artist's long engagement with ancient Egyptian art, which he encountered firsthand in Florence and Rome early in his career.

The show is also a practical response to the museum's current renovation and expansion of its modern art wing. At the same time, it reflects a broader curatorial strategy: bringing departments into closer conversation and collapsing the distance between the ancient and the contemporary. The Met used a similar approach in“Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” a 2024 exhibition that paired ancient artifacts with modern and contemporary works inspired by them.

The exhibition is a co-production between the Met's Egyptian and modern and contemporary art departments, represented by Aude Semat and Stephanie D'Alessandro, with Emilie Bouvard of the Fondation Giacometti also contributing to the project. In a statement, D'Alessandro said Giacometti“continuously returned to the question of how to infuse his work with the experience of being human,” adding that his engagement with ancient Egyptian art offered“formal clarity” and a model for how the figure could hold“stillness and intensity.”

Seen in and around the Temple of Dendur, Giacometti's attenuated figures will likely sharpen that tension further, setting the artist's spare, searching forms against one of the Met's most resonant historical spaces.

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