Alberto shared a sympathy for the surrealist movement with the Swiss artists he met in Paris and in 1927 began to display his first surrealist sculptures at the Salon des Tuileries. Success was not long in coming and Alberto began to befriend artists such as Arp, Mirò, Ernst and Picasso and writers including Prévert, Aragon and Eluard and was soon both writing and illustrating for several Surrealist magazines. It was also during this year that Alberto moved with his brother into the cramped studios in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron where they would work and live for the rest of Alberto's life.

In the late 1930s his career was interrupted by two major events - first by an accident in which a car ran over his foot, then by the outbreak of war. He spent most of the Second World War years in Geneva where he lived and worked in a small hotel room and supported himself by making furniture and doing interior decoration work passed on to him by his brother Bruno, who was an architect. Alberto returned to Paris in 1946 where he was once again reunited with his brother Diego. This was the beginning a new artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out, their limbs elongated in a space that contained and complemented them.

In January 1948 Giacometti's new work was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. The catalogue preface, written by Sartre, did much to propagate the idea that Giacometti's art was now one 'of existential reality'. From this point on his reputation as a sculptor (the paintings were neglected until the late 1950s) grew rapidly. He held his first European one-man show of the new work at the Kunsthalle in Basle in 1950, and his first Paris exhibition since the war at the Galerie Maeght in 1951.

In 1962 he received the Grand Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennial. In his later years he worked feverishly and displayed his work in many exhibitions throughout Europe. In the 1960s however, Giacometti's health began to fail. In 1963 he underwent an operation for cancer of the stomach. The cancer did not recur, but in 1965 heart disease and chronic bronchitis were diagnosed. Although seriously ill, he went to New York in 1965 for his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Giacometti died in January 1966 in Chur, Switzerland and was buried in Borgonovo, close to his parents.