Alberto Giacometti’s fascination with Egyptian art took hold early and shaped his practice for decades. After moving to Paris in 1922, he spent considerable time in the Louvre’s Egyptian galleries and assembled a personal library of books on the subject. That influence is visible in his sketchbooks from the 1920s and 1930s, and in the elongated, walking figures that would later define his sculpture.

Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur places 17 of the artist’s sculptures within and around one of the Met’s most iconic spaces. The setting is a temple commissioned under the Roman emperor Augustus around 10 BCE, dedicated to Isis and the deified brothers Pedesi and Pihor. It emerges from a long Nile Valley history of worship and monumental architecture, later marked by cycles of displacement and preservation. In the 1960s, as the construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened numerous Nubian sites, the temple was dismantled into 642 sandstone blocks. It was then transported across the Atlantic after being gifted to the United States in 1965, and reassembled at the Met in 1978.

Fourteen of the works are on loan from the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, including rarely exhibited polychrome plaster casts, while three others are drawn from the Met's own collection. Co-curated by Stephanie D'Alessandro, Aude Semat, and Emilie Bouvard across the museum's Modern and Contemporary Art and Egyptian Art departments, the installation is built upon a deceptively simple premise: that Giacometti's elongated, solitary figures and the temple's ancient statuary are engaged in the same inquiry, separated by two millennia and remarkably little else.

The pairing succeeds, and not merely on visual terms. Giacometti spent his career probing how little a figure requires to remain present, while the temple has spent two thousand years exploring the means through which form is granted permanence.

Together, they are a meditation on continuity between ancient and modern art. Across centuries, materials, and belief systems, the human figure remains a vessel through which societies negotiate memory, mortality, and transcendence. In the vast light of the Temple of Dendur, Giacometti’s attenuated silhouettes appear neither contemporary nor ancient. They join a lineage of forms that have sought to understand humanity’s place in time.