Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha is on fom May 8 until August 10 2025, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026.
In the Barbican’s new, light-filled gallery, the City of London skyline provides a fitting backdrop for the tall, wiry works of Alberto Giacometti beside the hybrid, fragmented figures of Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha.
For ‘Encounters’, the Giacometti Foundation lent some of the Swiss artist’s most elemental figures for an exhibition that will evolve in the coming months with responses from other artists, including Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum and American sculptor Lynda Benglis. In the first of the three, Bhabha’s sculptures focus on the fragmented body – but where Giacometti’s figures are stretched and attenuated, expressing solitude and existential suffering, she fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart.
Though separated by decades – Giacometti shaped by postwar Europe and Bhabha by postcolonial trauma and global violence after 9/11 – their works share a profound interest in the aftermath of war and the psychological scars left behind, speaking to the bruised and battered bodies that exist beyond the immediate experience of conflict.
Bhabha fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart
The exhibition demands a slow and meditative engagement. As visitors move throughout, the sculptors’ works are arranged at shifting heights: frozen in mid-stride or suspended in stillness, some rise on plinths, others lie splintered on the floor, forming a disjointed terrain of limbs and torsos. It is almost like walking through an archaeological museum.
In Bhabha’s works, severed clay heads are paired with solitary limbs, symbolising the violence inflicted upon the body as well as its inevitable decay. A lone figure explicitly draws from Giacometti, yet is reimagined in a language that feels simultaneously ancient and modern. In ‘Magic Carpet’ (2003), disembodied legs wear rubber wellington boots on top of a floating Bokhara rug. Inspired by Giacometti’s ‘Walking Woman I’ (1932) and his investigations into the moving human figure, the suggestion of movement through the paired disembodied legs recalls the iconography of ancient Greek representations of motion. On a whole, Bhabha’s figures feel fragile yet forceful, reinforced with materials such as Plexiglass and rubber.
The phrase ‘feet of clay’ – originating from the Book of Daniel as a symbol of an unstable foundation destined to collapse – resonates throughout this exhibition, acting as one of many threads linking the works of Giacometti and Bhabha. It offers a powerful reminder of how fragile human life is, and how even the strongest-seeming monuments can have hidden weaknesses. In Bhabha’s and Giacometti’s works, this fragility is more than a physical material – it is a lens through which the instability, impermanence, and human condition itself are explored.
