Huma Bhabha / Alberto Giacometti

The exhibition “Huma Bhabha / Alberto Giacometti” is held at the Giacometti Institute from February 6 to May 24, 2026. Specifically designed for this venue, it confronts the work of Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha with that of Alberto Giacometti around the human figure, through assemblages, plasters, painted bronzes, and terracottas. Two new standing figures engage in dialogue with The Walking Man, The Leg, and the Women of Venice, in a path orchestrated by curator Émilie Bouvard and scenographer Éric Morin.

Two creative spaces, two relationships to the body The route opens on a face-to-face between two worlds. Alberto Giacometti never left his studio at 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, focusing his creativity in barely 24 m². Huma Bhabha, based in Poughkeepsie since 2002 with painter Jason Fox, arranges her sculptures in a larger, brighter studio to observe them from afar, in all angles. This contrast opens “Huma Bhabha / Alberto Giacometti” at the Giacometti Institute on a question common to both artists: how to control the distance between sculpture and spectator. Huma Bhabha, So Am I, 2025, cork, polystyrene, clay, wire, bone, acrylic, oil stick, chalk, and wood In the courtyard, Giacometti’s Walking Man continues his advance. The feet of Bhabha's Untitled remain rooted to the ground despite a body as if blown away, like in the zombie films she enjoys. Through the window, Magic Carpet shows booted rubber legs resting on a dark red carpet, a playful reference to Giacometti’s silhouette. The humanity of their shared work is clear here: an attention to the violence of the world as well as its tenderness, without losing the dark irony that runs through their forms. Bhabha’s assemblages—wood, plaster, clay, wire, and acrylic—respond to Giacometti’s painted plasters. The disparity of components and the roughness of handling remain visible: Bhabha does not aim to charm. Visitors enter the heart of an exchange where the fragility of materials becomes the resilience of bodies.

When sculpture borrows from cinema The graphic art cabinet exhibits for the first time contact sheets by Swiss director and photographer Ernst Scheidegger, where Giacometti’s sculptures appear outdoors. The series of images evoke storyboards. Bhabha, passionate about science fiction and film noir, responds with her walking feet photographed around Karachi in the early 2000s, incongruous vignettes set in the urban landscape. Two films extend the dialogue in the Follot salon: John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946). In the large room, Don’t Cast a Shadow (2025), completed for the exhibition, stands like a great wounded. Its body, pierced by impacts, still stands. Its round head is touching, like the almost naïve simplicity of the marks striating the torso, highlighting the ribs and navel. This marking draws on scarification practices in African statuary and the realism of starving Buddhas with prominent ribs in Asian tradition. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), Walking Man II, 1960, plaster Walking Man II is one of three life-size plasters made by Giacometti in 1960 as part of a commission project for the Chase Manhattan Bank forecourt in New York, designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft. This project never materialized, but the figures created on this occasion—a tall woman, a walking man, and a large head—have become icons of 20th-century sculpture. The elongated, slender silhouette with massive feet seeming to lift off the base condenses human power and vulnerability. Giacometti first worked on the walking motif in 1947 with an early life-sized Walking Man inspired by the Egyptian model, before revisiting it in 1960 with these three definitive versions. In the exhibition, this figure is placed in the Institute’s courtyard, continuing its solitary walk facing Bhabha’s sculptures whose feet, by contrast, remain planted on the ground.

Fierce nobility and near-archaeological fragments The middle room gathers the female figures of both artists. For Giacometti, color highlights the emaciated body structure and gives it a ritual dimension. Up close, the paint emphasizes the bones, joints, and thinness of the Women of Venice (1956) or the Large Woman (1958). For Bhabha, the paint reinforces the sexual ambiguity of her sculptures. Fierce, a female figure created for the exhibition, stands alongside with an angular body and a face that appears eroded. All exude a fierce nobility, like modern maenads carried by the breath of Dionysus. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), Woman of Venice I, 1956, painted plaster The final room and corridor present terracotta works made by Bhabha in early 2022 during a residency in Oaxaca, Mexico. Fired in a traditional outdoor kiln, these nine untitled pieces show body fragments with subtle chromatic effects born from temperature variations. Waddah, titled after a prisoner who died at Guantanamo, reinforces this archaeological dimension.