Latest news with #AlbertoGiacometti
Forbes
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Art Review: Museum Cantini Debuts First Giacometti Exhibition In Marseille
Alberto Giacometti at Museum Cantini, Marseille © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock For the first time in its history, Marseille welcomes a major exhibition dedicated to the towering figure of 20th-century sculpture: Alberto Giacometti. Hosted by the Museum Cantini and organised in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, Alberto Giacometti–Sculpter le Vide is more than a retrospective. It's a deep and meditative exploration of Giacometti's obsession with space, absence, and the void–a subject that permeates every facet of his practice, from his earliest Cubist experiments to his haunting, elongated post-war figures. Curated jointly by Romain Perrin (Fondation Giacometti), Ines de Bordas (Fondation Giacometti), and Louise Madinier (Museum Cantini), the exhibition gathers over 90 works–including sculptures in plaster and bronze, alongside paintings, drawings, and prints–to interrogate the central question of emptiness in Giacometti's oeuvre. Through this lens, Sculpter le Vide succeeds in offering both a chronological and thematic journey, one that immerses viewers in Giacometti's shifting but always spatially-attuned vision of the human form. A Dialogue with the Void 'Giacometti is a sculptor of emptiness,' wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw in the artist's work an existential confrontation with the nothingness that surrounds and defines human presence. This philosophical grounding provides the conceptual backbone for the exhibition, which unfolds across four rooms, each with a distinct atmosphere and rhythm. The scenography–designed by a Paris-based studio–intuitively mirrors the progression of Giacometti's thought, emphasizing space, shadow, and form in careful balance. Museum Cantini's own architecture plays a significant role. The former 17th-century mansion, generously gifted to the city by Jules Cantini in 1916, is both intimate and grand. Its luminous rooms and flowing transitions set the stage for a show that is as much about seeing as it is about feeling. The exhibition opens with Giacometti's early sculptural experiments from the 1920s—cool, abstract works in marble and plaster that already hint at his preoccupation with volume and absence. Here, influences from Cubism and non-Western art abound. Works like Le Couple (1926) and Femme (plate III) (1927–29) reduce the human form to minimal shapes and incised lines, recalling stelae or ceremonial tablets. These are not depictions but evocations—carved spaces where presence and absence intermingle. Dominating this first room is Femme Cuillère ( Spoon Woman , 1927), a totemic form whose concave belly is both womb and void, echoing the shape of a spoon and the hollowness within. A perfect encapsulation of the show's title, it's also an emblem of Giacometti's early synthesis of surrealism, abstraction, and ritual. 'It's about sculpting around space, not just mass,' says curator Romain Perrin. 'This work defines his approach to negative space.' Femme Cuillère (Spoon Woman, 1927) at Museum Cantini, Marseille. Photograph © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock From Surrealist Dreams to Personal Loss As we move into the second section, the tone shifts. Here, the Surrealist years take centre stage, and Giacometti's engagement with dreams, desire, and psychological space comes to the fore. These works are darker, stranger, and more volatile–rooted not in form, but in feeling. One standout is Boule suspendue (1930), a delicately perverse assemblage where a ball hangs by a string over a curving form in a cage-like structure. At once erotic and enigmatic, the piece invites viewers into a surreal landscape where meaning constantly slips. Alberto Giacometti, Boule suspendue, 1930, Museum Cantini, Marseille © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock Nearby, Fleur en danger (1932) and the painting Le Palais à 4 heures du matin (1932) extend this dreamscape. But it is L'Objet invisible ( Hands Holding the Void , 1934) that marks the emotional and thematic climax of this section. Made shortly after the death of Giacometti's father, this sculpture of a masked figure cupping an invisible object is loaded with grief and mystery. The face, eerily reminiscent of Egyptian death masks or the metal face shields used in WWI, serves as both a personal relic and a universal symbol of mourning. Curator Louise Madinier explains that the exhibition deliberately places this work at a narrative turning point. 'It's an object of absence–there's nothing between the hands, yet the gesture is everything,' she says. 'This is where Giacometti starts truly sculpting the void.' Alberto Giacometti, L'Objet invisible, 1934-1935, plâtre, 153 × 32 × 29 cm, Fondation Giacometti. Photograph © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock Post-War Bodies and Fragile Existences The third room of the exhibition focuses on Giacometti's post-war period–the era of arguably his most iconic signature works. Here, the artist returned to figuration, but through a radically altered lens. Figures stretch, thin out, and dissolve into space, simultaneously monumental and spectral. These are beings in flux, caught between presence and disappearance. The exhibition's scenography again reinforces this tension. Very Small Figurine (1937–39) consists of a tiny figure displayed within a large glass case, its scale exaggerated by its environment. The emptiness around it becomes a kind of force field, amplifying its vulnerability. Similarly, Woman with a Cart (1943–45), The Nose (1949), and Large Woman I (1960) all explore how figures might inhabit–or resist–space. Perhaps the most theatrical display is Woman on a Chariot , set within a circular architectural partition that restricts sightlines and invites discovery. Only upon moving through the space does the viewer encounter the platformed sculpture in full–a deliberate staging that echoes Giacometti's interest in perception and movement. Light plays a critical role here too. Instead of flattening the forms, the museum's lighting scheme accentuates textures, drawing out the etched surfaces, gouges, and contours that make Giacometti's work so tactile. Alberto Giacometti - Sculpter le Vide at Museum Cantini, Marseille © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock A Museum Within a Museum The final room, titled L'Atelier de l'Imaginaire (The Imaginary Museum), is both epilogue and expansion. Inspired by André Malraux's 1947 book Le Musée Imaginaire , which posits that all of art history can live in the mind's eye, this space brings Giacometti's influences full circle. Here, the artist's drawings and archival documents are presented alongside ancient artifacts and non-Western objects from Marseille's own Musée d'Arts Africains, Océaniens, et Amérindiens (MAAOA) and the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology. Rather than presenting these juxtapositions as hierarchies or appropriations, the curators aim to create a respectful dialogue–one that acknowledges the complexity of influence without collapsing it into caricature. 'We didn't want to reproduce a colonial gaze,' explains Perrin. 'Each object is shown for what it is, in conversation with Giacometti's search for a universal form.' The room's inclusion also serves to root Giacometti within Marseille's Mediterranean identity. As a port city and cultural crossroads, Marseille feels like a fitting host for an artist whose imagination roamed from the Cycladic isles to the Egyptian tomb. Giacometti himself wrote in 1965: 'All the art of the past, from all eras, from all civilizations, arises before me; everything is simultaneous as if space took the place of time.' And as Perrin points out, Giacometti himself was a great museum-goer: 'He looked everywhere, at every time period, every culture. His work belongs to a global conversation about the human condition.' Alberto Giacometti - Sculpter le Vide at Museum Cantini, Marseille © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock A Long-Overdue Encounter The significance of Sculpter le Vide being held in Marseille cannot be overstated. Despite being France's second-largest city and home to a rich artistic tradition, this is the first time a major Giacometti exhibition has been presented here. As Perrin notes, 'The Museum Cantini is not only the right place architecturally–it also houses works by artists who were close to Giacometti, including André Derain, Balthus, and other Surrealists. He is surrounded by his friends.' More than just a landmark exhibition, Alberto Giacometti – Sculpter le Vide is a rare opportunity to encounter the artist's universe up close and in dialogue with the city of Marseille. It invites viewers to pause, to contemplate space not as absence, but as a force in itself. Giacometti's figures may be skeletal, even ghostly, but they are never hollow. In their solitude, they make the invisible visible. And in their emptiness, they hold everything. Alberto Giacometti - Sculpter le Vide at Museum Cantini, Marseille © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock Alberto Giacometti – Sculpter le Vide is at Museum Cantini, Marseille until 28th September, 2025. Co-organised by la Ville de Marseille – Musées de Marseille and la Fondation Giacometti, Paris .
Irish Examiner
02-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Nine foot beauty queen portrait sets auction record for a living female artist
The global art market is not immune to the trade winds of change blowing us all over the place right now. Even though they brought in $1 billion, the slimmed-down May sales in New York failed to reach their targets. On the minus side, a bust by Alberto Giacometti of his brother Diego, estimated at around $70 million (€61.57 million), failed to find a buyer at Sotheby's. On the plus side, the collection of Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio and his wife Louise made $272 million (€239.46 million) at Christie's, the only collection to realise this total in the last 18 months. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Marlene Dumas, South African-born born Netherlands-based 71-year-old old set a new auction record for a living female artist with Miss January, 1997. 'Miss January' by Marlene Dumas. She has explored portraiture for 40 years, and this monumental nine feet tall work of a beauty queen nude from the waist down, apart from a pink sock, sold for $13.6 million (€11.96 million) at Christie's. There were records too for previously overlooked 20th century women artists like Grace Hartigan, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Vara and Kiki Kogelnik. Christie's global president, Alex Rotter, said that what we are seeing is an emphasis on individual taste among collectors. 'Leaves of a Plant' by Georgia O'Keeffe made $12.9 million (€11.35 million) at Sotheby's. "The market is no longer about following the crowd. It is about individual taste and passions. What art makes you feel. That is a very interesting and exciting development for the market". The global downturn is influenced by factors like a decline in the number of Asian buyers and the absence of Russian wealth. These do not affect the market for Irish art. Underlying global uncertainty does play into the Irish market, but not at a level where the highs are stratospheric and the lows catastrophic. Our very conservative market is characterised by slow, steady growth. It operates in a relatively low-value segment, which shows up in all current statistics as being most immune to all that is going on. One segment that has proved to be not at all immune is the market for young contemporaries. Entirely absent from the sales this month were prices in the millions for young artists that few people had ever heard of. One possible explanation is that buyers of mid-career artists can afford to wait, as this work will continue to be available in the future, especially at a time of uncertainty. 'Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue' . The top lot of the week was Mondrian's Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue from the Riggio collection. It made $47.6 million (€41.87 million). Magritte's L'Empire des Lumieres from the same collection made $35 million (€30.79 million). There was a record at Christie's for Monet when his Peupliers au bord de l'Epte, crepuscule, sold for $43 million (€37.82 million) and set a new record for his celebrated Poplars series. 'Homme Assis' by Picasso. At Sotheby's, Picasso's Homme Assis from 1969 made $15.1 million (€13.28 million) and Georgia O'Keeffe's Leaves of a Plant made $12.9 million (€11.35 million). Roy Lichtenstein's Reflections: Art made $5.4 million (€4.75 million), one of nine Lichtensteins which collectively made $29 million (€25.51 million). There was a new world record for Mainie Jellett at Whyte's on Monday evening when Achill Horses, featured here last week, made a hammer price of €210,000. The previous record was €110,000 set at Whyte's in 2019 for Than Land Eire from 1940. This painting is included in the current Mainie Jellett Evie Hone exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland. Read More Works by leading Irish and international artists at outdoor exhibition in Cork
Indian Express
22-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Giacometti bust goes unsold: How do art auctions work?
Expected to be the highlight of Sotheby's sale in New York, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti's 1955 bust Grande tête mince (Grande tête de Diego) failed to find a buyer last week. One prominent reason for this failure was likely the bronze head's estimate — a whopping $70 million. In contrast to the 2015 auction record of $141.3 million for Giacometti's 1947 sculpture Pointing Man, the $70 million figure proved too intimidating. The auction market disappointment came mere days after a $30 million Andy Warhol painting was withdrawn from a Christie's sale when the consignor, who had put the work on auction, arguably realised it might not meet its asking price. These setbacks are seen as a sign of a struggling market, one that may require a reassessment of pricing expectations and collector sentiment. What are auction houses? An auction house essentially serves as an intermediary between sellers and buyers, receiving commissions from both. They may task a team to source and screen artworks based on market demand. 'Every auction is curated based on the different arts we want to feature, modern or contemporary,' Manoj Mansukhani, Chief Marketing Officer, AstaGuru Auction House, told The Indian Express. 'We need to create a mix that appeals to both seasoned collectors and new buyers. A few months are also dedicated to prepare the catalogue.' When is an artwork put up for auction? 'Historically, the primary reasons that prompt individuals to consign artworks to auction are the three D's: debt, death, and divorce', according to the Sotheby's Institute of Art. 'However, other factors such as a shift in personal taste or the need to downsize may also influence the decision to sell.' An auction house may be alerted about the existence of a rare or high-value artwork and subsequently collaborate with the owner to facilitate its sale. Christie's, for instance, remained in touch with Oslo University Hospital for over 13 years before it put MF Husain's 1954 canvas Untitled (Gram Yatra) on sale at an auction in New York in March 2025. This evocative homage to rural and pastoral life in India achieved a remarkable $13.7 million (approximately ₹118 crore), setting a new benchmark as the most expensive work of Indian art ever sold at an auction. How is the value of an artwork determined? The value of an artwork is estimated once it is verified and its provenance and authenticity are checked. Before a lot (comprising an item or a collection of items) is put up for auction, it is assigned a low and high estimate, providing a range of the expected value it could achieve. The auction catalogues reflect these estimates alongside the details of the artwork. The lower estimate typically serves as the reserve price, the minimum a seller will accept for the artwork, and below which a sale will not be made. The Husain mural sold at nearly four times its higher estimate of $3.5 million. The signature on the artwork and its provenance traced from the artist's studio onwards play a significant role in its valuation. Where it was exhibited and published are also factors taken into account. Similarly, its past or present ownership may also elevate the value. In 2016, Greek Landscape by the 'Grammarian of Art', Akbar Padamsee fetched Rs 19.9 crore at a Saffronart sale in Delhi, then a record price for the modernist. The piece was owned by Krishen Khanna, Padamsee's fellow artist and close friend, who had purchased it from artist-collector Bal Chhabda (also their close friend) over five decades back for Rs 1,000. After Saffronart sold Amrita Sher-Gil's canvas The Story Teller for Rs 61.8 crore in 2023 – then a record high price for Indian art – Dinesh Vazirani, co-founder of Saffronart told The Indian Express, 'The importance of the work in the oeuvre of the artist also plays a significant role. So, an MF Husain (who was very prolific) from the 1950s and 1960s compared to a later Husain will have a completely different (higher) value, and it will be the same for an SH Raza from the 1980s, a VS Gaitonde from the 1970s and 1980s, and a Tyeb Mehta from the 1990s (the periods during which each of these masters produced their most critically acclaimed works).' It is largely believed that the best works of Indian modernists are perhaps already with serious collectors and therefore rarely come under the auction hammer. When they do, they grab instant attention and escalating bids. In addition, some artists were less prolific than others, leading to even fewer of their works in the market. Sher-Gil, for instance, is known to have produced fewer than 200 paintings, of which a large number are with the National Gallery of Modern Art, and some are with her estate. This leaves approximately only 30-40 of her works with private collectors. How a work has been preserved or if there has been heavy restoration are considerations. Additionally, some media are traditionally more commercially favoured than others. For instance, canvases by the same artist are likely to be priced higher than drawings. A particular artwork might be distinctive in an artist's oeuvre. For instance, in the 1960s, VS Gaitonde had already started moving towards abstraction, inspired by Zen philosophy and spiritual teachings. His 1961 untitled oil with layers of pigment in tones of blue belonged to the same genre, but was cited as one of his last few horizontal canvases. When it came up for auction at a Saffronart sale in 2021, it fetched Rs 39.98 crore — a record for the highest price achieved for a work of Indian art in an auction at the time. Along with the historical sale price of similar works, the current market demand for the artist's work is also used to calculate the auction estimate. If there are no bids for a lot, or if the bidding does not reach the reserve price, the lot is bought in, meaning it remains unsold. Unsold artworks are usually returned to the consignor, who could ask the auction house to offer the artwork for auction again. This may be done after a delay, since the unsold work is considered burned, making it more difficult to find a buyer immediately at a similar price. A different scenario emerges if the artwork has a guarantee, done to ensure that it secures a pre-decided minimum price on its sale. This is practised occasionally for high-value or significant works that come up for auction. A guarantee may be offered by the auction house itself, in what is called a house guarantee. Alternately, it may be provided through an external undertaking, through a collector, gallery, or art dealer known as a third-party guarantee. The Giacometti sculpture, put on sale from the estate of real estate magnate Sheldon H Solow, who died in 2020, came to the auction without a minimum guarantee.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
With Guarantees Galore, Christie's Has a Rocky Start to Auction Week
Chandelier bidding. Quiet phone banks. Executives wiping their brows. One of the most anticipated auctions of the season proved to be anticlimactic on Monday evening at Christie's in New York, where many objects were pre-sold to guaranteed bids and there was little evidence of the enthusiastic buyers who defined the market's peak in 2022. Experts said the sale was marred by the economic uncertainty surrounding President Trump's tariffs and how they might hurt the global art market. Louise Riggio consigned nearly 40 works from the collection she built with her husband, the Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio, who died last year. A second auction on Monday night, called the 20th Century Evening Sale, fared better, with some artworks selling above their estimates and livelier bidding on the phones and in the room. The auction house had guaranteed the consignors an undisclosed minimum amount for their entire collection and then worked feverishly in recent days to offload the auction house's risk, object by object, by finding outside buyers to leave their own pre-sale bids on works by modern masters like Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. At first glance, the Riggio collection appeared to have done fine with a $272 million total, including buyer's fees. But stripped of the fees, the sale fell short of the auction house's pre-sale expectations that included a low estimate of $252 million. 'Coming in? It should be now, ideally,' said the auctioneer, Adrien Meyer, at one point, struggling to find bidders on one of the lower-priced items in the sale, a terra-cotta vase by Picasso that ultimately sold within its estimate for $567,000, including fees. The top lot of the Riggio sale was a 1922 gridded painting by Mondrian that had once greeted visitors in the grand entryway of the bookstore tycoon's Park Avenue apartment. It sold for $47.6 million, including fees. The canvas, 'Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue,' fell short of the previous record for a Mondrian, $51 million, set just three years earlier at Sotheby's. The canvas — no bigger than a throw pillow, at nearly 21 inches square — was still a showstopper in a bleak sale. The art dealer Brett Gorvy said the Mondrian's failure to spark a bidding war was a result of its aggressive estimate, about $50 million. 'This wouldn't have been such an issue a year ago when real depth of bidding was a major factor for driving prices.' he said. 'Overpricing at the start was a deterrent with many collectors, despite the quality and rarity of the work.' As the first major sale of the auction season, the Riggio collection was seen as a bellwether for this week's major sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, which have a combined estimate from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion. The 20th Century Evening Sale that followed finished with a total of $217 million including fees, against a low estimate of $194 million — squeaking by when taking into account the buyer's fees. A major setback came mid-auction when the company announced it was withdrawing the season's most expensive Warhol painting, 'Big Electric Chair,' which had carried an estimate of about $30 million. 'The weakness of the Warhol market is a definite takeaway.' said the art adviser Jacob King after exiting the auction floor. 'There is so much uncertainty in the financial markets, the response of the auction houses was to put guarantees on everything.' But there were some signs of life. Paintings by Gerhard Richter, Vincent van Gogh and Helen Frankenthaler sold for above their high estimates, a sign of demand in the art market. 'Peupliers au Bord de l'Epte, Crépuscule,' an 1891 Monet painting of poplar trees sold for nearly $43 million including fees, after a five-minute bidding contest. The lawyer Thomas Danziger, who represented the anonymous seller behind the canvas, said the purchase — within the auction house's estimate of $30 million to $50 million — was a positive sign. 'The world has obviously changed since the frothy art market of 2022,' said Danziger. 'When it's a choice between a blue chip painting and a more speculative artwork, a savvy collector is likely to say 'Show me the Monet.'' Not all sales were created equal, however, and some successful transactions demonstrated how far the market had fallen for certain artworks. A painting by Lucio Fontana that had sold for nearly $14 million at Christie's in 2017 (or $17.4 million when adjusting for inflation) returned to the auction house on Monday evening. It sold for just $7.5 million, including fees. Bonnie Brennan, the chief executive at Christie's, said the company had a positive performance. 'It was a solid result,' she said. 'Would we have liked to see even more excited bidding in the room? Of course.' As Alex Rotter, Christie's global president, added: 'It's a healthy market. One needs to work it very hard.'
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Huma Bhabha review – ‘Giacometti is a foil to her flamboyance. She is today's Picasso'
A n artist has to ask big questions and have intense thoughts to get away with exhibiting among the profound masterpieces of Alberto Giacometti. I didn't give much for Huma Bhabha's chances. But she takes the Barbican's new daylit art gallery by storm. Grey morning light from windows that look across the brutalist ponds at St Giles Cripplegate pours through big holes in her 2019 sculpture Mask of Dimitrios. This roughly assembled human figure has plastic bags for breasts – not inflated but sagging pieces of dirty polythene – a metal chair for a skeleton enhanced by blackened dog bones, plaster arms and legs, a battered tray for a face, all tacked together over an inner emptiness. It is a troubling patchwork of a person, incomplete, unfinished – like us all. Just as Giacometti created universal images for his time, so Huma Bhabha creates them for ours. And the results are not pretty. Bhabha was born in Karachi in 1962 and lives in New York state. Giacometti died in Switzerland in 1966 after a life that shaped our very idea of seriousness in modern art. Starting out as a surrealist, creating hybrid forms at once erotic, violent and inexplicable, he became a primeval visionary whose thinned, starkly pointing or walking figures with their tall narrow faces express the reduced yet still-standing state of humanity after the second world war. The Giacometti Foundation has lent some of his purest, most archaeological figures. Four Women on a Base, cast in bronze in 1950, look like lucky Pompeiians who have walked out of the pyroclastic cloud of Vesuvius. Over by the window, another group of striding emaciated people are framed against concrete and sky – heroically anti-heroic icons of modern existence. 'This is intentional grotesquerie' … Huma Bhabha Encounters: Giacometti. But Bhabha makes poor Alberto seem museum-bound. You admire miniature figures by Giacometti standing to attention in their cases but are distracted by her rougher, rawer, terracotta-and-concrete shapes on the floor around them: a severed, chewed, gawping head, a bunch of gnarled human bones, a pair of swollen feet. Bhabha is in subtle dialogue with Giacometti – or is she ever so gently taking the piss? Her traumatised clay-covered heads, feet and other scattered parts mirror his charred ruins of humanity. Yet it is hard to tell if they are homages or parodies. As the exhibition unfolds, Giacometti becomes more and more a foil to her flamboyance, a skinny Polonius to her witty Hamlet, as her existential questions start to feel more urgent, restless and resonant than his. Giacometti, at least as represented here, is an artist who does one thing with monumental perfection. (His surrealist works would have told another story). Bhabha is an omnivorous eater and vomiter up of traditions and conventions, modern one moment, prehistoric the next, exhilaratingly embracing bad taste. In the gallery's antechamber are four massive statues with bodies that are solid rectangular blocks on which she has incised distorted outlines of body parts and interior organs. These gross, corporeal towers have titles including Mr Stone and, er, Member. This is intentional grotesquerie by an artist who is totally in control of her hideousness. Bhabha emerges as not a follower of Giacometti at all. With her savage embrace of what can only be called by that 20th-century word 'primitivism', her mixing of beauty and revulsion, her pastiches, her awe at the mystery of human existence, she is today's Picasso. Mask of Dimitrios, with its chaotic human image supported by a chair frame, is highly reminiscent of an Oceanian mask owned by Picasso, now in the Picasso Museum, Paris, which he enhanced by placing on a little wooden chair. Restless and resonant … Bhabha's Magic Carpet (2003). Photograph: Kerry McFate/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery She is not, however, a European artist, embracing the 'primitive' from elsewhere, but a Pakistani American who sees Europe as the outsider, the incomer, the brutal stranger. Near Giacometti's striding legs she displays her 2003 piece Magic Carpet, in which two booted white legs, bum in the air, stalk over a Mughal-style rug. Yet she looks for the same kind of universal language that Giacometti and Picasso found in their ransackings of world art and myth. Her powerful statue Scout looks like an ancient Egyptian Ka figure or sarcophagus that's been burned then buried – she created its charred look by applying paint to cork. The cultural cannibalism of her art is as insolent and boldly entitled as the great 20th-century modernists. Ugliness trumps elegance in this energising show. Instead of another depressing reminder that 21st-century art isn't a patch on 20th-century modernism, it proves the opposite – that artists today are still able to find the new and wild by recooking the many cultures of our ever-shifting world. The Reform chairman recently said Britain needs more patriotic statues and less 'crazy modern art'. Huma Bhabha's art is a punch in the face for such attitudes – and a satisfying punch it is. At the Barbican, London, 8 May-10 August
