Giacometti was born October 10, 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland to Giovanni and Annetta Stampa. His father, a neo-impressionist painter, and godfather, the painter Cuno Amiet, assisted with his artistic development. Giacometti moved to Geneva, Italy to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and sculpture and drawing at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers. During a trip to Venice and Rome in 1920, he developed a passion for the work of Tintoretto and Giotto and resolved to recover the innocent gaze of man's origins through primitive art and anthropology. In 1922, he moved to Paris to study with sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin, and began experimenting with Cubist and Surreal imagery. In 1925, his brother Diego joined him in Paris and became his permanent assistant. In 1927, he began to display his surrealist sculptures at the Salon des Tuileries and showed the same year in Zurich, Switzerland with his father in Galerie Aktuaryus. Giacometti had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris (1932) followed by another at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York (1934).
Giacometti associated with a range of artists and intellectuals, including Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso, Balthus, and writers such as Prévert, Aragon, Beckett, Eluard, Bataille, Queneau and Sartre whose thoughts helped influence his work. He also became close friends with Breton and contributed to his magazine Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. After his father's death in 1933, Giacometti withdrew in a self-imposed exile, focusing his art on the idea of "absolute resemblance." From 1935 to 1940, he concentrated on the study of the human head, starting from the gaze as the ‘seat of thoughts'. He also drew entire figures in an attempt to capture the identity of individual human beings with a single glance.
Giacometti spent WWII in Geneva, but returned to Paris in 1946. After this, his figures became isolated, elongated and impossibly thin through continual reworking. His scale shifted to include larger works, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became in an effort to situate the figure in space and focus on the sensation on the gaze. In 1962, he received the Grand Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. In his later years he worked frenetically, often setting works aside and returning to finish them years later. His prints are often overlooked, but the catalogue raisonné, Giacometti - The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings by Herbert Lust (Tudor 1970), comments on their impact and details of the number of copies of each print, some of which were limited to editions of 30 and described as rare in 1970.
After the recognition of the Venice Biennale, demand for Giacometti's work grew exponentially and he is included in major museums across the world. In 1965, he traveled to New York, despite being seriously ill, for his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He died January 11, 1966 of heart disease and chronic bronchitis at the Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace in Borgonovo, where he was interred close to his parents. His last work was the text and lithographs for the book entitled Paris sans fin, a collection of memories of all the places he had lived over the course of his life.