Sculpture by a great name of 20th-century art, Alberto Giacometti, is on view at Compton Verney, along with work by new talent, James Coleman, writes THERESA THOMPSON

Compton Verney has done it again. Cleverly tempting you in with a name you know, it hits you in the face with a demanding modern artwork from a name you might not know but whose work is every bit as memorable. With Alberto Giacometti and James Coleman, the Warwickshire gallery has paired two distinct exhibitions that evoke awareness of space, distance, apartness, memory, and physical and emotional presence or absence.

Four galleries are devoted to Giacometti (1901-1966), sculptures, paintings and drawings from 1946-57, a period when the Swiss-born artist living in Paris developed the idiosyncratic style for which he is famous. Obsessed with spatial relationships, his sculptures became patently human figures whose elongated emaciated forms possess an aura of mysterious totemic isolation, at once disturbing and attractive, anxious and serene.

Two galleries contain installations by James Coleman, one of the most distinctive artists practising today, says senior curator John Leslie. Coleman, who was born in Ireland in 1941, has since the 1970s working from Dublin and Paris, created a body of work that reflects on the subjective nature of the image.

In I N I T I A L S, 1993-94 and Untitled, 1998-2002, both on show in Britain for the first time, he explores the physical and psychological boundaries between viewer and projected image.

Kathleen Soriano, Compton Verney's director, suggests one starts with Coleman. This is wise. His installations demand time and are "quite an experience" says Soriano, who confesses she was "really shaken" when she first saw them, they so intensely stir up personal memories and imagination.

I N I T I A L S, a continuous 21-minute-long slide projection with a narration, has conjured up reactions from "chilling", "menacing" and "moving" to being compared to choreography stills from a ballet, says Soriano.

But there's nothing like seeing for oneself, so off I went, edging my way forward into the pitch black gallery where I N I T I A L S was under way.

The word narration implies there is a story; likewise being told there's a beginning and an end. If there is one, however, it's hard to grasp. It's all rather puzzling. Later I find out some of the words come from The Dreaming of the Bones, a W.B. Yeats play, not that it helps much to know. But both play and exhibition reflect on the way past and present are inextricably linked.

Upright figures in various groupings, in costumes from periods from theatre, literature and soap opera, appear in bleak hospital settings encountering equipment used for examining and interpreting reality. Grim-faced, they all face outwards - and none communicate by word, gaze or gesture.

Curbing impatience at the pace, at nothing apparently happening, at the child narrator's voice with its multiple pauses and sighs and hmm . . . s' - a style you get accustomed to but never actually like - you start to construct your own stories about those stern mannequins, and pluck out associations from your own experience and memory.

And that is its power. The piece has slowly progressed with the click-click-click of the slide projector hypnotically producing images like a story-board, and the voice has haltingly spelt out word-pictures with disconcerting themes, like dry bones', barium-stained lips', excommunication'. If you have stuck it out to the end, you realise it has taken hold, making deep connections to imagination and memory that match the narrator's plaintive desire that these people don't just "gaze one on the other . . . then turn away," but communicate.

Putting aside any lingering unease provoked by Coleman, I went into the Giacometti exhibition and the special brand of existential anxiety expressed in his sculptures. I felt relieved, grounded even. His work is now so pleasingly familiar that his skinny figures, firmly rooted on their bronze bases, seem to offer dignity to the human condition.

But first, a lively photograph of the wild-haired sculptor in his studio (around 1960) taken by Ernst Scheidegger greets me. Then two bronze sculptures, The Forest (1950) and Four Figurines on a Base, the former inspired by childhood experiences playing near his home at Stampa explained in a letter Giacometti wrote in 1950 as "the trees . . . always seemed to me to be like people who have stopped while walking, to talk to one another". So, these figures at least, unlike Coleman's, had their roots in people who did communicate.

Drawing allowed Giacometti to explore beneath the surface of the figure, giving form to the tensions and energy within. Examples here include Portrait of the Artist's Brother whose face peers from behind a mass of scribbles, a painting of the novelist Jean Genet, and 16 lithographs from his 1969 Paris Sans Fin series which show the beginnings of him fashioning archetypes of human beings, and result in works where figures seem to appear and disappear in a void.

Space, above all that separating the figure from the viewer, was paramount to Giacometti by the 1950s. Four Figurines on a Stand (1950-65) seem distant and unreachable, almost engulfed by the space around them. They remind us of the physical and psychological spaces separating us, and make a fitting finale to this small but otherwise enjoyable exhibition.

The Alberto Giacometti and James Coleman exhibitions are on until June 1 at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, just 45 minutes drive north of Oxford. For further details see www.comptonverney.org.uk