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.

The artist has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including LIVIN’ THINGS, M Leuven (BE) in 2023; A fly appeared, and disappeared, MO.CO. Montpellier (FR) in 2023; Touching Earth, curated by Nicholas Baume, at Casa Wabi Foundation, Puerto Escondido (MX) in 2022; Against Time at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (UK) in 2020; They Live, curated by Eva Respini, at ICA Boston (MA) in 2019; We Come in Peace, Rooftop Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY) in 2018; Huma Bhabha: Other Forms of Life at The Contemporary Austin (TX) in 2018; and Unnatural Histories at MoMA PS1, New York (NY) in 2012, among others.

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.