Giacometti's sculptures conceal a wider process of both creation and destruction

This major retrospective of the career of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, which spreads across the entire top floor of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and includes almost 600 works in all - sculptures, paintings, drawings, notebooks, maquettes, photographs and much else - sets itself a very particular challenge. It invites us to see Giacometti's work in the context of the particular studio space in Montparnasse he occupied for almost 40 years.

This is both the exhibition's point of departure, and its thematic centre. The studio, it argues, was not only his place of work, but also the focus of his ritual practice as an artist. It was a space of making, destruction and remaking. Thanks to many loans from the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, we see both tentative beginnings - in notebook drawings and sculptural fragments - and final outcomes in finished pieces. This is an exhibition that is devoted as much to an examination of process as to the finished artefact.

The decisive moment in Giacometti's career can be dated fairly precisely. It was in December 1926 that he moved into the new working space in Montparnasse, Paris, that would once have been within walking distance of this exhibition. (The building itself was destroyed in the 1970s.) This studio, a living-cum-working environment that was both small and monastically austere - he used to draw his drinking water from a pump outside in the courtyard - was to be his creative crucible until his death in 1966.

The exhibition begins with glimpses of his childhood in Switzerland, which includes an early painting of the seven-year-old Alberto by his father, Giovanni, who paints his child impressionistically. Elsewhere, a still life of apples on a decorative tablecloth by a 14-year-old Alberto shows a huge debt to Cézanne.

The son soon moves away, physically and emotionally. The best of the works in this first space include some of his most radical sculptural forms from the 1920s - Spoon Woman, for example, a neo-primitive exercise in stacked forms, in which the female body is represented by a white, concave bowl.

The creation of an exhibition that stimulates both mind and eye is no easy matter. Buildings can feel inflexible, and almost overbearing in their pomposity and architectural rigidity. Plinths can be too obtrusive, and sit too tall. Lighting can be too uniformly glaring. In short, artist and space so often seem to be at war with each other.

This, by contrast, is an exemplary piece of exhibition-making. The exhibition spaces are of varying sizes and shapes. Each piece is displayed with an extraordinary sensitivity to scale, height and relative positioning. When we require concentration of a very particular kind, the spaces seem to close in on themselves. A dark, almost tunnel-like room, for example, explores how Giacometti helped to nurture his own legend by encouraging some of the world's greatest photographers - Man Ray, Karsh, Irving Penn and Robert Doisneau, for example - to capture his image amid the ferment of artistic Paris. Here he is, hirsute, reptilianly leaden of eye, with suitably blackened fingernails.

Immediately afterwards, in Room 4, the space seems to explode outwards as we examine a huge display of objects and works that would have been together inside his studio. After Giacometti's death, sections of the plastered wall on which he was accustomed to paint and doodle were removed from the building, and they are now displayed here, with the result that we can see original sketches behind finished works. Although the room itself is large and open-plan, the walls against which the works are displayed in this room follow a gently containing curve.

Here are some of Giacometti's most characteristic works - all those ghostly, over-stretched, attenuated figures which seem like spectral essences of themselves, together with objects that would have been in the studio alongside them - a cupboard, tables, a rusting wood- burning stove. A great striding man is displayed in front of a partially finished plaster maquette of the same piece, complete with awkward juttings of thin wire. The maquette seems to be walking in shadow, as if urging along the creative process that is striding boldly ahead towards its inevitable conclusion. The sight of these maquettes, and of other fragile and equally tentative sculptural beginnings, makes the finished works seem like miraculous survivors of some ceaseless process of rejection and paring away.

In a recently discovered snatch of archival film, which was found in the archives of the Pompidou Centre, and is shown here for the first time, Giacometti is seen working on a painting of his friend, the poet Jacques Dupin. The finished painting stands behind the film, on the very easel at which he was working.

One of the most surprising moments comes towards the end of the exhibition when Giacometti, relatively late in his life, is trying his hand at other challenges - a pen and ink drawing of Henry Matisse in profile, for a medal bearing his image, for example, or in a drawing for a Stravinsky record sleeve.

It is the sheer, engrossing approachability of the Matisse drawing which catches us up short. Giacometti, whose work so often seems to embody states of extreme and almost chilling isolation, appears to be reaching out towards the older master in a gesture of familial warmth.

"The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris until 11 February 2008

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