Huma Bhabha Museum Without Walls Huma Bhabha Museum Without Walls, 2005 Clay, wire, wood, Styrofoam 34 x 13 1/2 x 25 inches (86.4 x 34.3 x 63.5 cm) (HB 207) $125,000
Alternate View Museum Without Walls, 2005 Alternate View Museum Without Walls, 2005
Alternate View Museum Without Walls, 2005 Alternate View Museum Without Walls, 2005 Huma Bhabha
Huma Bhabha’s materials and forms are largely drawn from the urban residue and historical overlay of the two cities that she has occupied over the course of her life: Karachi and New York. Born in 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, Bhabha moved to the United States in the early 1980s to study at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 1985) and Columbia University in New York (MFA. 1989). She has been active as a visual artist since the early 90s, and has steadily risen to international prominence over the past two decades.
Bhabha’s work addresses themes of colonialism, war, displacement, and memories of place. 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, Ghandharn Buddhas, African sculpture and Egyptian reliquary. At the same time, it remains insistently modern, looking to Giacometti, Picasso and Rodin for inspiration, as well as the artwork of Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Television, Sci-Fi, horror movies, and popular novels similarly find their way into her narratives, such as the writings of Phillip K. Dick, the television series South Park, and the films of David Cronenberg as well as the Predator and Alien franchises. As her reconfigured references overlap and multiply, they become an avenue to explore place, memory, war, and the pervasive histories of colonialism.
Huma Bhabha has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2015); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); MoMA PS1, New York (2012 and 2005); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2012); Aspen Art Museum (2011); Whitney Museum of Art, New York (2010); the 7th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2008); and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2006). She is the 2013 recipient of the Berlin Prize, Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship from The American Academy, Berlin, and the 2008 recipient of the Emerging Artist Award from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, New York. In 2018, Bhabha was selected to create a site-specific installation for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden titled Huma Bhabha, We Come in Peace. Recently, she has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Austin titled Other Forms of Life (2018) as well as a survey retrospective at ICA Boston titled They Live (2019). Bhabha’s work was also included in the 57th edition of the Carnegie International (2018) and is now featured in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN (2020). Huma Bhabha lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Please note, the availability of the work is subject to change.