Review: Giacometti and Huma Bhabha – ‘an extraordinary balancing act’

Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha
Barbican Level 2, London EC2; until 10 August

A Giacometti in your own home: what would that be like? What presence might one of his thin men, forever fused with its base, exert on the room around it? We are so used to seeing his sculptures in white cube galleries, each in its own LED halo in realms of sanctified space, that to encounter them in daylight, within hand’s reach, seems almost unimaginable.

It is not impossible for the blue-chip collector, of course, not least because some of Alberto Giacometti’s art is so astoundingly small. A famous old story tells of the artist taking the night train from Geneva to Paris at the end of second world war carrying all his recent work. No matter how large his sculptures began, they always ended up smaller and smaller, he said, until everything he had made in the last few years could be contained entirely in six matchboxes.

The Barbican’s new art space, which opened last week, is roughly the size of a matchbox to the rest of this colossal institution. It used to be the second-floor restaurant. The centre’s head of visual arts, Shanay Jhaveri, has had it cleared of tables, waiters and diners, laid a beautiful ash-pale floor, cleaned the windows to let in the light and curated the first of three exhibitions devoted to Giacometti and big-name sculptors who most keenly feel his influence.

Walk in and what used to be the cocktail bar is dense with strangers (some of them paradoxically familiar). Diminutive men and women, some as small as a sewing needles, stand rooted to the spot on blackened bronze plinths, arms immobilised by their sides. Solo, or alone in small groups, pausing or trying to stride forward like jaywalkers impatient for the lights to change, they are trapped in these rectangular bases.

And no matter how small they are, their presence is magnetic. You do not strain to see the details of a tiny Giacometti so much as reel back in amazement at its force of personality. Some of his figures are stalwart, bolt upright and stark; others appear like citizens seen far away on some distant street, isolated in their own preoccupation.

Laid among them, sometimes so low as to be almost on the floor, are equally solitary figures by Huma Bhabha. Born in Pakistan in 1962, long resident in New York, Bhabha was four years old when Giacometti died of heart disease at the age of 64. Yet their sculptures have obvious affinities. Bhabha’s lone figures are often formed from junk – scrap metal, plastic bags, chunks of wood, old planks or chairs – but she too works with her hands in clay and casts in dark bronze.

Two great terracotta feet, gnarled and abraded, are positioned on a low box. One appears to be ever so slightly in front of the other, like relics of those ancient Greek statues of young men known as kouroi. But these feet cannot move; are as stalled as the Giacomettis all around them.

A claggy head lies on its side, elongated neck ending in something more like a foot. Poor soul. It connects with Giacometti’s larger-than-life head, big but wan in its pale plaster clumsiness: no body, going nowhere. And it also invokes another Giacometti story, about the artist leaving a group of small figures on the studio floor and returning one day to discover the expression of existential anxiety he sought in this chance arrangement.

Turn a corner and a second gallery of figures appears, receding down a long narrow space, something like a street. There is Giacometti’s much larger Walking Man I, forever mired in his own tethered stride, nearly knocking his head against the ceiling. But also his trio of tiny men, stuck in their vicious circle beyond. You start to think much more about scale.

Oh, says Bhabha’s big metal head, open-mouthed, inarticulate, remote. A small iron block titled Lodger, close up, hemmed in, vestigially humanoid, is beginning to rust – as if it were mortal.

The works of both sculptors perform this extraordinary balancing act: human by affinity, association and to some extent form, these objects are equally and emphatically sculptures. In Giacometti’s The Glade, nine little pencil-thin verticals rise up from the base like stems in a window box, yet the slightest undulations render them human. Passing by, as it seems, are Bhabha’s two disembodied cylinders, connected like a pair of legs.

No matter what size, all these works are scaled in mind, view and experience, via the architecture of this new space, to the size of living people. In a curatorial coup, right at the far end of the show, a small Giacometti man appears as himself – that is to say, a sculpture – then as a shadow on the wall, then as a reflection in the window and, finally, as the adjunct to an actual man on the walkway outside: a real human counterpart who can break his bonds and stride away.

While art-worlders are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Tate Modern, with its grand canyons, gargantuan voids and neck-cricking views of the old Turbine Hall soaring high above; while visitors are still riding the high escalators that never seem to stop on the right floor, and trying to engage with galleries designed for everything but easel paintings or indeed Giacomettis, it is good to have a new space on a human scale.

Mona Hatoum and Lynda Benglis follow next, after Bahbha Bhabha, in this series of shows, offering exactly what the title promises: close encounters of the most intimate kind.

Photographs: Max Creasy/ Barbican Art Gallery, courtesy of the artists, Fondation Giacometti and David Zwirner Gallery