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Forbes
6 days ago
- 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 .
Telegraph
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
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.
