06-05-2025
Encounters: Huma Bhabha x Giacometti: A strange meeting in the Barbican's awkward new gallery
Someone at the Barbican has smelled an opportunity. The old brasserie on level two of the Brutalist complex in the City of London is now an art gallery, inaugurated by this 'encounter' between Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) and the Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha (b 1962), whose monumental bronze sculptures apparently of two battered ancient deities dominated the roof garden of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Subtitled Nothing is Behind Us, the show is the first in a year-long series of three encounters between contemporary artists and the Swiss sculptor, in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti.
With an awkward, L-shaped floor plan, and distracting views across the estate to St Giles' Cripplegate, this linear space comes with challenges. The curators respond by imagining the gallery as a 'street' filled with figures – some standing, others sitting, a few striding or seemingly mooching – like citizens going about their business. Since Giacometti was inspired by the strangeness, as he perceived it, of Parisians moving through the metropolis, this is effective, establishing a dynamic between the sculptures and passers-by outside.
At the same time, the prospect of people cheerfully eating and drinking jars with the sombre mood of everything on display. That Giacometti was the poster boy for post-war Existentialism is well known; his sculptures look considerably spookier in a dramatically lit free display in Tate Modern's subterranean Tanks (until Nov 30), where the atmosphere – appropriately, given that he was inspired, in part, by Egyptian and Etruscan funerary art – is of the underworld or an ancient tomb.
As for Bhabha, her self-consciously lumpen humanoids often appear to be charred and gouged, as if they've survived a catastrophe. In the first part of the show, her works consist of seemingly chopped-up body parts (blobby feet, tentacular arms, a disembodied ear, a decapitated head), crudely modelled in terracotta and presented on concrete plinths, like casts of victims at Pompeii.
What do we learn from this pairing? There are correspondences, such as agitated surfaces, sometimes attacked with a knife, and an overarching impression of a world in crisis. Artful juxtapositions make these plain.
But Giacometti was obsessed with attenuating form: some of his sculptures are so spindly you worry they're about to snap, while, for all his purposefulness, Walking Man I (1960) appears unable to extract two massive triangular feet from a sludge-like plinth. Bhabha prefers a sense of blocky solidity, and, unlike Giacometti, is inspired by science-fiction.
She also relishes assemblage, in the manner of a different member of the School of Paris, Pablo Picasso: Mask of Dimitrios (2019), a powerful, prominent piece, like an enthroned but bedraggled god, uses a metal chair as an armature, and incorporates two bone-shaped rubber dog toys and a couple of pendulous plastic bags like withered breasts or deflated lungs.
For Distant Star (2025), the only work made for this show, Bhabha channelled her inner Giacometti to produce an elongated column like an oversized sceptre in cast iron, sprouting an unsettling, eyeless head; it appears at the end, beside Giacometti's Standing Woman (1957).
Yet, curiously, this 'encounter' crystallises differences between these two powerful artists, as much as similarities.
