Announcing Huma Bhabha’s Public Art Fund Presentation at Brooklyn Bridge Park

A major public installation, Huma Bhabha: Before The End, is now on view at the Uplands Lawn at Pier 3, Brooklyn Bridge Park, through March 9, 2025. Curated by artistic & executive director Nicholas Baume, the exhibition borrows its title from the works of Medieval writer Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1184–1264), author of supernatural and apocalyptic writings. Conceived for the site, the exhibition comprises four monumental painted and patinated bronzes cast from carved cork and skull fragments. Bhabha’s deeply resonant hybrid figures seem to simultaneously dwell in the past, present, and future. Hovering between states of ruin and repair, these sculptures appear either as bearers of the collective casualties forced on nature, or as signs of fresh life emerging from the earth.

Drawing from both natural and manmade materials, Bhabha’s outdoor public installations serve as large-scale contemplations on nature, war, and civilizations across time. At once grotesque and humorous, these sculptures continue her engagement with the human figure.

Installed along the Pier 3 Uplands Lawn at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Bhabha’s four totemic sculptures are set against iconic landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, One World Trade, and the bridges connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan. As noted by Public Art Fund, “the park itself also serves as a significant setting, having undergone an evolution over time that conceals the rubble of centuries of history beneath its surface.”

Bhabha’s sculptures were most recently on view in Welcome…to the one who came at our 20th Street gallery in New York, the artist's solo debut since joining the gallery in 2022. The exhibition featured seven new sculptures pulling from a wide range of references that span the history of art to science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life.

Included in both Welcome…to the one who came and Before The End is the sculpture Nothing Falls (2024). The work takes the form of a rectangular earthen body that surges upward from the ground and pushes its bone-white, outsized skeletal animal head toward the open sky. As with many of her recent sculptures, Bhabha considers the plinth to be an intrinsic part of the work, lending the overall arrangement the feeling of a mortal relic or an artifact from another world.

Before The End marks the artist’s second major public commission in 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. Comprising two large-scale sculptures, We Come In Peace conjured a moment of contact between extraterrestrial and human life. Each was meticulously assembled from ephemera such as cork, Styrofoam, air-dried clay, and plastic, then cast in bronze. At once monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human, Shanay Jhaveri, former assistant curator of South Asian art, called Bhabha’s totemic figures “monuments to the precarity of living.”

Since the 1990s, Huma Bhabha (b. 1962) has become known for layered and nuanced work that centers on reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities. Her formally inventive practice encompasses sculpture, drawings, and photography. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Bhabha moved to the United States in 1981 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, from which she received her BFA in 1985. She later studied at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York, from which she received her MFA in 1989. The artist presently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Bhabha has been the recipient of notable awards, such as the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship, Berlin Prize, awarded by The American Academy in Berlin (2013); and the Emerging Artist Award, awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008). In 2022, Bhabha was elected as a National Academician by the The National Academy of Design, New York. In 2023, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.