London
Four of Huma Bhabha’s towering apocalyptic figures (2024) set the scene for “Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha” (on view through August 10, 2025), the first in a series of exhibitions organized in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti. Hovering somewhere between human and non-human, ancient and modern, the familiar and the strange, these are anti-monuments, cast in bronze from carved cork and skull fragments, their surfaces gouged and incised. Bhabha suggests that they are a warning, but standing in the foyer space, they could equally serve as guardians of what lies beyond.
Entering this inaugural exhibition in a new space within the Barbican feels akin to a sacred encounter. It is a bold choice to pair the works of Bhabha and Alberto Giacometti, although both artists explore the representation and experience of violence in corporeal form. The low-ceilinged, l-shaped gallery, with large windows punctuating almost every wall, would seem a difficult space to display sculpture, but this show demonstrates how such challenges can be turned to advantage.
“Encounters” falls into two parts. The first section is experienced as a landscape of sorts—a wasteland, a battlefield, or perhaps an archaeological site—that expands on issues that Giacometti began to explore in 1950. The Glade, Four Women on a Base, and Composition with Three Figures and a Head (The Square) (all 1950) reflect the idea of figuration within a landscape, referencing the urban streets and squares that he recalled in the postwar period. These important works, which marked a change in Giacometti’s practice, are surrounded by fragmentary body parts that Bhabha made during a 2022 residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, using unglazed local clay fired in a traditional pit kiln. In what might be thought of as a field of ruination, decapitated heads, fragmented limbs, and amputated feet rest on low-level plinths, together evoking a horrific landscape. The violence evoked in these works is the same violence from which Giacometti’s figures walk away.
In the exhibition’s second section, single figures, including Giacometti’s iconic Walking Man I (1960) and Bhabha’s Magic Carpet (2003), range across a long length of space to form an interior street scene. Visitors walk among, and with, these figures, convening and reconvening, passing in silence or in conversation. Even seated figures like Bhabha’s Mask of Dimitrios (2019) betray signs of movement in fragile, vulnerable lungs and the flow of tears on stained cheeks. Similarly, in Giacometti’s Man with a Windbreaker (1953), the highly textured surface (along with the title) suggests a shifting, moving landscape.
Spanning almost a century of making, and ranging across plaster, bronze, and terra cotta, as well as assemblage and found objects, this is a complex exhibition made to look effortless through pitch-perfect curation. The works’ varying heights counter and accentuate the low ceilings. Concrete plinths echo internal and external architecture elements. Precision lighting casts perfect shadows, notably in the case of Giacometti’s Standing Woman (1957) and Man with a Windbreaker. Sight lines run the entire length of the space, allowing for sometimes unexpected encounters as Giacometti meets Bhabha meets viewer, the slender poise of Giacometti’s figures balancing against the mass and occasional messiness of Bhabha’s hybrid forms. It is a flawless match.
“Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha” is followed by Mona Hatoum in September 2025 and Lynda Benglis in February 2026.
