The Barbican presents a major new exhibition by artist Huma Bhabha, the first in a series of three groundbreaking exhibitions in partnership with Fondation Giacometti. Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha is the first time Huma Bhabha and Alberto Giacometti’s works will be seen together. Subtitled Nothing is Behind Us, the exhibition is Bhabha’s first at a public institution in London.
Inaugurating a new, intimate space within the Barbican, the sculptures in this show, drawing from Bhabha and Giacometti’s oeuvres span nearly a century of artmaking, encompassing a range of media – plaster, bronze, terracotta – along with assemblage and found objects.
Bhabha’s exhibition is followed by Mona Hatoum on 3rd September 2025 and Lynda Benglis on 5th February 2026. The exhibitions bring together the practices of three contemporary artists known for their originality and ingenuity, alongside historic works by Alberto Giacometti. Each artist will present a mix of pre-existing and new artworks which resonate with and at times respond directly to Giacometti’s sculptures, opening up new intergenerational connections and dialogues. You can visit all three Encounters exhibitions for just £20 with a multi-buy or add an Encounters ticket to any Barbican event ticket for£5.
Amongst the works on display are iconic pieces by Giacometti such as Walking Woman I (1932) and Walking Man I (1960), as well as the tabletop sculpture The Glade (Composition with nine figures) (1950). This work, which visitors encounter on entering the exhibition, marked a turning point in Giacometti’s practice and was borne of his desire, to create work that reflected people as he witnessed them on the street or squares, “coming and going…unconscious and mechanical… each having an air of moving on its own, quite alone.”
Taking a prompt from Giacometti, Bhabha approaches the gallery space as if it were a street: sculptures are grouped to engender the feeling of a gathering, in which individuals potentially cross paths with one another. As visitors move through this convening, the ancient, modern and contemporary intersect, with both artists sharing a deep and enduring interest in the body as an embodiment of the traumas of our times. The Barbican Level 2 gallery becomes a landscape where fragmentary works lead onto a procession of ghostly and vulnerable figures that collectively speak to ongoing conflicts in which human life becomes collateral damage.
Bhabha presents existing works drawn from across her career, along with a new commission in iron, created especially for this exhibition. The public foyer outside the gallery also hosts four monumental painted and patinated bronze sculptures, recalling pre-modern effigies which Bhabha debuted at her Public Art Fund exhibition Before The End in Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City in 2024, which are being shown in Europe for the first time. Of these, Nothing Falls and Feel the Hammer have been generously loaned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.
Giacometti is one of the most significant European sculptors of the 20th century, known for his distinctive, elongated sculptures which experiment with the human form. Some of the most stirring works in his oeuvre were created in the same post-war period in which the Barbican was built. Perceived sometimes as responding to the pain and devastation caused by the Second World War, his works proposed a new perspective on humanity and the collective psyche. This radicality resonates with the utopian principles underpinning the establishment of the Barbican, which sought to explore a new way of thinking and being where the arts were regarded as vital and central to enriching modern living.
Visitors to these exhibitions will observe the exchanges between contemporary art practices and Giacometti’s work that complicate simple interpretations of artistic influence and formal likeness. The invited artists have shared interests in death, fragmentation, the domestic, memory, trauma, the erotic, horror and humour – and manifest their preoccupations in vastly different ways through their own work. It is the exploration of these timeless and existential concerns that forms the connecting threads between the three living artists and Giacometti.
Each exhibition considers what occurs at the meeting point of bodies of work that are deeply affective and emotive, responding to the anguish and despair of a wounded world.
The pairing of Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha’s sculptures in the inaugural exhibition of the Encounters: Giacometti series, powerfully summons the repercussions of on-going conflicts on everyday life. Both artists through a shared grammar of form, have committed to try and represent the experience of violence on the human body, underscoring the temporal nature of the act of violence, its after-life, with brutal lingering effects. In the face of collapse – as the exhibition’s title states – while ‘nothing is behind us’, Bhabha and Giacometti’s empathetic presences remind us that loss creates intimate links between one another, where we are all bound by the shared dignity of endurance.
Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican
Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha, 8th May – 10th Aug 2025, Barbican Level 2
Standard admission for each exhibition will be £8 but you can see all three Giacometti exhibitions for just £20 with a multi-buy or add an Encounters add an ticket to any Barbican event ticket for just £5.
Each of the three exhibitions will take place in a new exhibition space within the Barbican, formerly the home of the Barbican Brasserie, which closed on 10th February 2025. This exciting new space will be used flexibly for a range of purposes in the coming years, allowing the Barbican to continue offering a world-class experience for its visitors as it undergoes vital work on different areas of its building.
The Encounters: Giacometti series is realised in partnership with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; with generous support from Blanca & Sunil Hirani Foundation and additional support from the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation.
All photos © Mark Westall
