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’s work is currently included in Unsettled Objects at Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE) until June 2021 and Everyone Is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (DE) until August 2021. Bhabha’s current survey retrospective, Against Time, at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (U.K.) is on view until July 2021. 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 Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); the Saatchi Gallery, London (U.K.); the Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY); and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (CT), among many others.