White Chapel Somerset presents Behind The Mirror, a project exploring the fragile, unresolved image of the human figure through the works of Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and contemporary French painter Pierre Halé.
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Spanning post-war modernism to present-day practice, Behind The Mirror centres around rare lithographic works by Giacometti and Bacon, originally published by Galerie Maeght for Derrière le Miroir, and now brought into fresh dialogue with Halé’s emotionally charged oil paintings. Curated by White Chapel Somerset founder Miranda Glover, the exhibition interrogates the existential crisis of the body across media, generations, and historical ruptures.
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Giacometti and Bacon, two titanic forces in 20th-century figuration, each dismantled the illusion of permanence. Giacometti’s spindly sculptures and sketch-like drawings strip the body to a spectral essence, while Bacon’s contorted forms implode within claustrophobic interiors. Both offered stark meditations on trauma, mortality and the void—a visual response to the violence and dislocation of their time.
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Working from a rural studio in Dorset, Halé (b. 1960, France) channels these anxieties into a deeply personal, contemporary language. His raw brushwork and flesh-toned impasto paintings echo the immediacy of Bacon’s canvases and the meditative repetition of Giacometti’s portraiture. His inclusion in Unquiet Forms reanimates this lineage, extending its reach into the psychological present.
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Halé’s partner, artist and novelist Lulu Allison, joins the conversation through a special event on Saturday 10 May, exploring character and presence across painting and prose. Her creative partnership with Halé reflects the role of intimacy within all three artists’ practices—from Giacometti’s wife Annette and Bacon’s muse Isabel Rawsthorne, to the narrative inflections in Halé’s own studio life.
Key works in the show include lithographs of Rawsthorne by both Giacometti and Bacon, exhibited alongside Halé’s portraits, creating an uncanny, cross-generational mirroring of form, memory, and gaze.
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The gallery space echoes the studio as psychological terrain: a zone of collapse and reconstruction, solitude and confrontation. Here, Behind The Mirror ecomes a meditation on the persistent question haunting modern and contemporary art: What does it mean to be human—and what remains of us in the act of being seen?
