NICOLE KLAGSBRUN
INDEPENDENT 20TH CENTURY

The Breuer | Booth 413 + 414
945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021 
September 24–27, 2026 

Jonathan Silver, Medea, 1985.

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present Jonathan Silver and Herbert Matter at Independent 20th Century, on view at Sotheby’s New York, The Breuer, September 24–27, 2026. The presentation brings  together sculptures and drawings by American artist and art historian Jonathan Silver (1937–1992) with  black-and-white photographs by Swiss-American photographer and designer Herbert Matter (1907– 1984). Their distinct bodies of work enter into dialogue through sustained but fundamentally different  engagements with Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966): while Matter revealed new dimensions of  Giacometti’s sculpture through photography, heightening its frontality and material presence, Silver  transformed Giacometti’s formal and psychological intensity within a fragmented and mythologically  charged language of his own. 

The presentation centers on the standing figure. Five of Silver’s bronzes—Diana (1987), Medea (1983),  Orpheus and Eurydice (1983), St. Cecilia (1983), and Small Venus (1980)—are shown alongside  graphite drawings dating from c. 1975 to c. 1992, in which the same narrow, upright form recurs. Thirteen photographs from Matter’s 1978 portfolio Thirteen Photographs: Alberto Giacometti and  Sculpture—a portrait of Giacometti and twelve studies of his sculpture—extend this investigation to  Giacometti’s own elongated figures, including Man Walking (1950), Standing Woman (1948), City  Square (1948), Walking Man I (1959–60), and Seven Figures and a Head (The Forest) (1950). 

Silver was a sculptor, art historian, writer, and teacher whose modernist lineage ran through Rodin,  Medardo Rosso, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Giacometti. He pursued doctoral research on  Giacometti’s painting at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro before setting his dissertation aside in the early 1970s to make sculpture his primary practice. He later taught at the New York Studio  School, founded in 1964 by Mercedes Matter (Herbert Matter’s wife). 

Over the following two decades, Silver developed a figurative language in which Cubism served as an inspiration for constructing and reimagining the human figure, an interest evident in his 1974 essay “Giacometti, Frontality and Cubism.” Critic Michael Brenson has noted “the Cubist collage aspect of Diana” (1987), whose seemingly disparate parts come together within a single body. 

Some of Silver’s early heads were modeled, fragmented, and reassembled into frontal constructions.  As sculptor Tom Otterness observed in a filmed conversation with Brenson, Silver cut, shifted, reversed, and reassembled cast fragments in a number of these works, creating physical and psychological tensions between positive form and negative space. His work also drew on the compact mass of ancient Egyptian sculptural heads and the dramatic intensity of Hellenistic sculpture.

In Silver’s mature standing figures, psychological intensity extends throughout the body. Their titles draw upon classical, biblical, and mythological sources, but the works do not illustrate inherited narratives; they release myth into a fractured modern sculptural language. As Brenson wrote in The  New York Times in 1984, “Silver’s sculpture is steeped in classical and religious myth.” His reading emphasized Silver’s engagement with modernism, particularly the formal and psychological implications of Cubism and Surrealism. 

Matter met Giacometti in 1950 through their mutual friend Pierre Matisse, the influential New York  dealer whose gallery served as a vital bridge between European modernism—including Surrealism—and American collectors and museums. He was subsequently commissioned to photograph Giacometti’s sculpture and design the catalogue for the artist’s first American museum exhibition, presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1955. Matter continued photographing Giacometti and his work through 1965. Through staging, framing, lighting, and the shaping of each print  in the darkroom, he intensified the sculptures’ frontality, isolation, material presence, and psychological  charge. The resulting images operate not only as documents but as autonomous interpretations of sculpture through photography. 

Matter worked for years on a monograph devoted to Giacometti, designing the book but leaving it unfinished at his death. Mercedes Matter saw the project through to publication by Harry N. Abrams in  1987. The volume includes her text, a foreword by Louis Finkelstein, and an introduction by critic Andrew Forge. Forge described Matter’s photographs as both acts of description and criticism and as works of imagination generated by the encounter between sculpture and photography. 

Silver’s Small Venus (1980), rising as a narrow column more than five and a half feet tall, offers a direct  point of connection with Giacometti’s elongated female figures, including Standing Woman (1948), represented in Matter’s photographs. In Matter’s images, framing and light heighten the sculptures’ precarious presence; in Small Venus, Silver gives the standing figure a corporeal, archaic resonance of its own. 

At Independent 20th Century, the presentation brings these two practices into focused dialogue through their shared concern with the human figure. For Matter, Giacometti’s sculpture becomes the basis for an autonomous photographic image; for Silver, his engagement with Giacometti forms part of a broader exploration of myth and psychological interiority. Together, their works present the figure as a continuously renewed field of perception and experience.