Alberto GiacomettiStanding Woman c.1958-9, cast released by the artist 1964

During the late 1950s Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures, their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender, emaciated forms convey a vivid but fragile human presence. The writer Jean Genet commented: ‘The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.’