“My goal is that each work should be intense in its presence and aggressively attract the viewer. I'm very interested in beauty, but like it best when it's unexpected.”
Huma Bhabha
(b. Karachi, Pakistan, 1962)
Huma Bhabha’s objects, drawings, collages, and sculptures are centered on the human form. Using styrofoam, cork, rubber, paper, wire, clay, found objects and detritus, Bhabha’s uncanny vocabulary is distinctly her own. At once lifeless and soulful, her characters are often fractured hybrids posing timely questions about the qualities of “the foreign” and the criteria by which life-forms are considered monsters. In her monumental outdoor projects for public spaces, she uses bronze to stage large-scale meditations on nature, war, and civilization’s ancient past and distant future.
Bhabha arrived in the United States in 1981 to attend art school. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 1987. The artist began her career studying painting and printmaking, though her works soon began, as she has noted, “growing off the walls.” Bhabha’s solo exhibitions at institutions include the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2018); Roof Garden Commission, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018); David Roberts Art Foundation (2017); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2012); and Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2011). Bhabha’s work is in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., where her monumental work We Come in Peace (2018) is on view in the museum’s sculpture garden.
Bhabha lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.
