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Huma Bhabha
The Niels Borch Jensen Galerie is delighted to announce the first solo show in Germany of the Pakistani/US- American artist Huma Bhabha. Opening on February 4, 2011, 6 – 9 pm.
Huma Bhabha’s work consists in ecstatic, powerfully attractive sculptures, drawings, photographs, and prints. With a sensitivity unlike any other’s, she manages to find common ground between the world’s most disparate cultures. “In today’s era of cut-and-paste, only a handful of other artists can match her authenticity of expression” (Art in America). The New York Times Style Magazine inducted her into its “Nifty 50” of “America’s up-and–coming talent.”
Outlines, shadows, deserted landscapes, and feet – the works on exhibit appear to be united by a latent affinity. Bhabha’s works can be broadly divided into two categories:
The first includes her engravings, which are based upon photographs of desert landscape outside the city of Karachi in Pakistan. Bhabha paints onto the photographs with black India ink, then transfers the image onto an engraving plate. The prints have a turbulent and romantic effect, recalling Caspar David Friedrich.
The second group of works on exhibit are large-scale c-prints of her sculpture in landscape. In Huma Bhabha’s hands, single photographs attain almost cinematic proportions. They stage a humorous interplay of sculptures in ever new and different locations. These works recall the French sculptor Constantin Brancusi, rather than Friedrich. But all the prints we exhibit – etchings and photographs alike – bear witness to Bhabha’s masterful expression in a unique medium.
„One of the most interesting figurative sculptors around, Huma Bhabha, recently began making large-scale photo-based works she calls drawings.“ (New York Times)
„A lone pair of feet stands in a millennium of lost civilizations passing time, and rediscovered sources. This don’t miss-outing is a candidate for best show of the year.“ (Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine)
Huma Bhabha was born in 1962 in the port-city of Karachi, Pakistan. She has lived in the United States since 1981. She completed a Bachelors degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985, and a Master of Fine Arts in 1989 at Columbia University. As many of her works make manifest, Bhabha continues to feel a strong connection to her homeland. She broke through into the art scene at the ATM Gallery in 2006, and in 2010 had solo shows in two premiere New York locations: the new premises of Salon 94 in the Bowery and the Peter Blum Gallery in Chelsea. Her work was included in “Statuesque” in the New York City Hall Park in downtown Manhattan. She was in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the 14th International Sculpture Biennale in Carrara, Italy. In 2008 she won the Emerging Artist Award of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.