Huma Bhabha : Welcome…to the one who came

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. 

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