Huma Bhabha : Welcome…to the one who came

Name: Huma Bhabha
Start: 2024-2-22
Location: David Zwirner

David Zwirner is pleased to present concurrent exhibitions of work by Huma Bhabha (b. 1962) at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street and 34 East 69th Street locations in New York. These are the gallery’s first presentations of Bhabha’s work since the announcement of her representation in 2022, and they follow the artist’s 2023 solo exhibition at M Leuven, Belgium, which subsequently traveled to MO.CO., Montpellier, France. In March 2024, three sculptures by Bhabha will be specially featured in the retrospective exhibition Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. In April 2024, a large-scale installation by Bhabha, commissioned by Public Art Fund, will be unveiled at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York.

Bhabha creates layered and nuanced sculptures and drawings that center on a reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities. Her formally innovative practice pulls from a wide range of references, from those that span the history of art to quotidian influences such as science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life. Instinctive and rigorous, her work brings diverse aesthetic, cultural, and psychological touchstones into contact with matters of surface, materiality, and formal construction. Featured at West 20th Street are new sculptures, varying in size from small to monumental; on view at East 69th Street are new works on paper and smaller-scale sculptures. Together, the exhibitions highlight Bhabha’s ability to move between a wide range of media and forms, creating deeply resonant hybrid figures that seem to simultaneously dwell in the past, present, and future.

Image: Huma Bhabha, Even Stones Have Eyes, 2023 (detail).

Location

537 West 20th Street New York New York, 10011

Dates

February 22—April 13, 2024

Opening Reception

Thursday, February 22, 6–8 PM

Gallery Hours

Tues—Sat 10am–6pm

Artist

Huma Bhabha

Press Release

Welcome…to the one who came

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Welcome…to the one who came, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

The exhibition in Chelsea comprises a grouping of figures in patinated and painted bronze or cast in iron. The works are sculpted from materials including styrofoam, cork, and clay, which the artist then carves, gouges, paints over, and otherwise marks up before casting.

While distinct in appearance and size, all the sculptures in the exhibition seem to be connected by a kind of genetic thread, forming an emotional hive that resides in a shared landscape of destruction, displacement, and rebirth.

Huma Bhabha

What Should it Be, 2024

Painted and patinated bronze and concrete pedestal

Overall: 44 3/4 x 31 x 31 inches (113.7 x 78.7 x 78.7 cm)
Artwork: 38 1/2 x 12 x 11 inches (97.8 x 30.5 x 27.9 cm)
Pedestal: 6 1/4 x 31 x 31 inches (15.9 x 78.7 x 78.7 cm)

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A lone diminutive figure cast in bronze and painted from the neck down in styrofoam pink, What Should it Be stands like a ringmaster or liminal guide poised at the threshold of distinct physical or psychic terrains as it leads visitors into a charged zone, recalling the titular character from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science-fiction cinematic masterpiece Stalker.

Huma Bhabha, What Should it Be, 2024 (detail)

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Welcome…to the one who came, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

The exhibition—which coincides with a presentation of Bhabha’s drawings and smaller scale sculptures at our uptown gallery—comes on the heels of a series of solo exhibitions of the artist’s work in museums worldwide, including MO.CO., Montpellier, France, M Leuven, Belgium, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshaed, United Kingdom, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: A fly appeared, and disappeared, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, France, 2023–2024

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Livin' Things, M Leuven, Belgium, 2023

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Against Time, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom, 2020–2021

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: They Live, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, 2019

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2018

“Bhabha’s dance between the activation and suspension of our human identification allows us to take pleasure in the sculptures’ viscerally charged state.… Holding this tension is a strong sense of Bhabha’s hand: the molding, shaping, pinching, and scraping by which she made the objects is reflected in the many traces of physical manipulation that mark their surfaces.”

—Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator, Public Art Fund

Huma Bhabha

Untamed, 2024

Cast iron and concrete pedestal

Overall: 55 x 22 x 22 inches (139.7 x 55.9 x 55.9 cm)
Artwork: 19 x 12 x 12 inches (48.3 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm)
Pedestal: 36 x 22 x 22 inches (91.4 x 55.9 x 55.9 cm)

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Beyond lies a group of three cast-iron sculptures—Bhabha’s first foray into the medium—of disembodied heads and torsos laid out on concrete plinths, glowing fiery orange as they rust, as if caught in a radioactive wasteland or left for dead on the scorched surface of Mars.

Huma Bhabha, Untamed, 2024 (detail)

“Bhabha’s sculptures often appear as if at a distance. They are almost always built to be seen from at least four sides and change as one moves around them. But focusing too closely on details sometimes causes them to disappear. They exist between things, and remain open to the unconscious, occupying a liminal space between ancient and nascent.”

—David Levi Strauss, poet, writer, and critic

Huma Bhabha

The Other Side, 2024

Cast iron and concrete pedestal

Overall: 54 1/4 x 20 x 17 inches (137.8 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm)
Artwork: 18 x 11 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches (45.7 x 29.2 x 18.4 cm)
Pedestal: 36 1/4 x 20 x 17 inches (92.1 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm)

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The cast-iron works will continue to oxidize and evolve in appearance, affirming the notion of time as a primordial sculptor’s tool—a concept that Bhabha has repeatedly returned to in her oeuvre.

Huma Bhabha

Lodger, 2024

Cast iron and concrete pedestal

Overall: 65 x 40 x 38 1/2 inches (165.1 x 101.6 x 97.8 cm)
Artwork: 29 x 16 x 14 1/2 inches (73.7 x 40.6 x 36.8 cm)
Pedestal: 36 x 24 x 24 inches (91.4 x 61 x 61 cm)

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“Sculpture, more than any other art form, is about time and history—the use of materials which can last for centuries.… And now, in recent history there is an increased use of fragile, temporary materials that seem to reflect the speeding up of decay—the production of instant ruins.”

—Huma Bhabha

Huma Bhabha, Lodger, 2024 (detail)

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Welcome…to the one who came, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

Huma Bhabha

Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything, 2024

Patinated bronze

88 1/2 x 18 x 18 inches (224.8 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm)

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Further inside are two upright figures, Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything and Nothing Falls, both cast in bronze. The former presents a multiheaded creature whose arms are pressed to its chest in prayer or panic.

Huma Bhabha, Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything, 2024 (detail)

“Her sculptures suggest a number of possible and expansive narrative threads that are fraught with both pagan and monotheistic epics of expulsion and apocalypse, science-fiction tales of end-times, and the introduction of an alien ‘other.’ In an America that has long been hostile to women, black and brown communities, Muslims, and immigrants, Bhabha’s address of the residual effects of colonialism and imperialism in the landscapes of her youth underscores a certain sense of urgency.”

—Eva Respini, deputy director, Vancouver Art Gallery

Huma Bhabha

Nothing Falls, 2024

Painted and patinated bronze

96 x 18 3/4 x 22 inches (243.8 x 47.6 x 55.9 cm)

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The latter takes the form of a rectangular earthen body that surges upward from the ground—reminiscent of the unshakable monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey—and pushes its bone-white skeletal head toward the open sky as if it is a holy relic or ritual sacrifice on a dais.

Huma Bhabha, Nothing Falls, 2024 (detail)

These two sculptures flank the largest figure in the show, Even Stones Have Eyes, which stands more than twelve feet tall. With its shadowy Januslike faces that have been etched, scarred, and seemingly charred, this peg-legged behemoth exudes a thrilling stillness and horror as it towers over its companions like a watchful parent surrounded by its brood.

Huma Bhabha

Even Stones Have Eyes, 2023

Patinated bronze

148 x 61 x 50 inches (375.9 x 154.9 x 127 cm)

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At once monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human, Bhabha’s totemic figures recall cycles of growth and decay, destruction and restoration, thereby challenging our understandings of permanence, monumentality, and personal and collective histories.

These exhibitions in our New York spaces precede two forthcoming projects. First, in March 2024, three sculptures by Bhabha will be specially featured in the retrospective exhibition Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Soon after, in April 2024, a large-scale installation commissioned by Public Art Fund will be unveiled at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York.

Huma Bhabha, Even Stones Have Eyes, 2023 (detail)

“For Bhabha, the history of figurative sculpture has always provided textural material for her work, but so too is the dark history of imperial power relations. It is precisely in considering the intention of an artistic imaginary like Bhabha's—in which the continual dialogue between past and present can serve to resist the simple categorizations of modern, post-colonial, postmodern, global, local, etc.—that allow [institutions] to invite a more sustained and critical discourse over common binaries and dichotomies.”

—Shanay Jhaveri, head of visual arts, Barbican Centre

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Welcome…to the one who came, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

On View at 34 East 69th Street

Huma Bhabha

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An installation view of the exhibition, Huma Bhabha: Welcome...to the one who came, at David Zwirner in New York, dated 2024.

Huma Bhabha

What Should it Be, 2024

Painted and patinated bronze and concrete pedestal

Overall: 44 3/4 x 31 x 31 inches (113.7 x 78.7 x 78.7 cm)
Artwork: 38 1/2 x 12 x 11 inches (97.8 x 30.5 x 27.9 cm)
Pedestal: 6 1/4 x 31 x 31 inches (15.9 x 78.7 x 78.7 cm)

Inquire

Huma Bhabha

Untamed, 2024

Cast iron and concrete pedestal

Overall: 55 x 22 x 22 inches (139.7 x 55.9 x 55.9 cm)
Artwork: 19 x 12 x 12 inches (48.3 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm)
Pedestal: 36 x 22 x 22 inches (91.4 x 55.9 x 55.9 cm)

Inquire

Huma Bhabha

The Other Side, 2024

Cast iron and concrete pedestal

Overall: 54 1/4 x 20 x 17 inches (137.8 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm)
Artwork: 18 x 11 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches (45.7 x 29.2 x 18.4 cm)
Pedestal: 36 1/4 x 20 x 17 inches (92.1 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm)

Inquire

Huma Bhabha

Lodger, 2024

Cast iron and concrete pedestal

Overall: 65 x 40 x 38 1/2 inches (165.1 x 101.6 x 97.8 cm)
Artwork: 29 x 16 x 14 1/2 inches (73.7 x 40.6 x 36.8 cm)
Pedestal: 36 x 24 x 24 inches (91.4 x 61 x 61 cm)

Inquire

Huma Bhabha

Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything, 2024

Patinated bronze

88 1/2 x 18 x 18 inches (224.8 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm)

Inquire

Huma Bhabha

Nothing Falls, 2024

Painted and patinated bronze

96 x 18 3/4 x 22 inches (243.8 x 47.6 x 55.9 cm)

Inquire

Huma Bhabha

Even Stones Have Eyes, 2023

Patinated bronze

148 x 61 x 50 inches (375.9 x 154.9 x 127 cm)

Inquire

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