Pointing Man by Alberto Giacometti set the auction record for a sculpture when it sold in 2015.
Giacometti created Pointing Man, a thin bronze figure with one arm extended, in 1947. The work belongs to the artist’s postwar period, when his elongated human figures explored isolation, distance, and the fragile presence of people in modern life.
At Christie’s in New York on 11 May 2015, Pointing Man sold for 141.3 million US dollars, including the buyer’s premium. The result made it the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction at that time. It was later surpassed by other works in private-market and auction records, so the historical claim must be tied to 2015.
The sculpture is sometimes confused with Giacometti’s Walking Man I, another famous elongated bronze from the same period, but the two works have different poses and titles.