Huma Bhabha

Huma Bhabha’s (b. 1962) work addresses themes of memory, war, displacement, and the pervasive histories of colonialism. Using found materials and the detritus of everyday life, she creates haunting human figures that hover between abstraction and figuration, monumentality and entropy. While her formal vocabulary is distinctly her own, Bhabha embraces a post-modern hybridity that spans centuries, geography, art-historical traditions and cultural associations. Her work includes references to ancient Greek Kouroi, Gandharan Buddhas, African sculpture and Egyptian reliquary. At the same time, it remains insistently modern, looking to Giacometti, Picasso and Rauschenberg for inspiration, as well as to science fiction, horror movies, and popular novels.

Bhabha’s work is currently included in Hi Woman!, curated by Francesco Bonami, at Museo Palazzo Pretorio, Prato (IT) through March; Flesh Arranges Itself Differently at the Hunterian, University of Glasgow (GB) through April; A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA) until May; and Our whole, unruly selves at the San José Museum of Art (CA) through June. She is also currently the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Nicholas Baume at Fundación Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido (MX), which features sculptures made while in residence. Past solo exhibitions include Against Time at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (UK) in 2020; They Live at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (MA) in 2019; We Come in Peace at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY) in 2018; Other Forms of Life at The Contemporary Austin (TX) in 2018; and Unnatural Histories at MoMA PS1, New York (NY) in 2013. The artist has also participated in many group exhibitions globally, including the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN in 2020; the 57th edition of the Carnegie International in 2018; the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2015; Intense Proximity- La Triennale 2012 at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR) in 2012; Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York (NY) in 2012 and 2005; the Whitney Biennial in 2010; and the 7th Gwangju Biennale (KR) in 2008.

Bhabha’s work is represented in the collections of the Bronx Museum of Art, New York (NY); Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris (FR); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA); the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); the Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE); Tate, London (UK); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY); and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (CT), among many others.