Drawings on photography and figurative sculptures carved in cork and Styrofoam, made with waste materials and clay, or cast in bronze, with which Bhabha explores the tensions between time, memory, and uprooting. Between science fiction, archaeological remains, Roman ruins and post-war utopia, the artist transforms the human figure into grinning totems, disturbing and sinisterly amusing figures at the same time. The Company is partly inspired by “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941), a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which an imaginary society is overwhelmed by the system of a lottery that dispenses rewards and punishments and where the Company, a non-existent organism that decides the destinies of people.
The photographic drawings recall these characters, who seem to come from a distant futuristic realm as well as a lost civilization. The standing figures are carved from piles of dark cork, giving off an acrid smell of earth, and its technical opposite, Styrofoam. These materials, with a hard and compact appearance, such as eroded stones and freshly extracted marbles, are actually light and soft and allow Bhabha to sculpt quickly and spontaneously without finishing.
The faces of the Bhabha sculptures are like majestic and perturbing masks. Painted in pastel tones—light blue, mauve, pink and green—recall graffiti, in which urban dirt mixes with brightly colored pictorial interventions. With their crazed cartoonish features the Bhabha sculptures almost seem to tease and warn alike.
Bhabha has long argued that the world is an apocalypse, created by both man and nature: his looted sculptures seem to be witnesses of a certain catastrophe which they managed to survive to tell their story.
Like a pharaoh enthroned or a cyborg pelted by a hail of shrapnel, a seated figure is made with yellowish clay compressed into wire mesh, speckled Styrofoam shards, toy dog bones, and rusty chairs sourced from Karachi, the birthplace of Bhabha, caught in a crossfire of internal and international conflicts. In Bhabha's large format drawings, human and non-human figures inhabit the space shared by photography, collage and pictorial gestures: their heterogeneous faces and indistinct shapes seem to haunt landscapes, city streets and architectural sites. In one of these, a blue and beige arch interferes with a photograph that Bhabha took in Rome, at the Capitoline Museums, of an ancient statue of a dog, with two kouroi white looming in the background. On the occasion of the exhibition, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome hosts the artist in conversation with Cristiana Perrella, director of the Luici Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato, on 18 September at 18.00. The conversation, open to the public, will be held in English.
Huma Bhabha was born in 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Center Pompidou, Paris; Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Among her most recent institutional exhibitions are numbered Huma Bhabha, Aspen Art Museum, CO (2011–12); players,Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2012); Unnatural Stories, MoMA PS1, New York (2012–13); We Come in Peace, Roof Garden Commission, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018); Other Forms of Life, Contemporary Austin, TX (2018–19); And they live, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019). Bhabha has participated in the exhibitions Intense Proximity, The Triennale, Paris (2012); All the World's Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and at the 57th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2018).#HumaBhabha
Cover image: Huma Bhabha, Beyond the River, 2019 – Cork, Styrofoam, rebar, wood, acrylic, and oil stick, 103 × 37 × 30 inches (261.6 × 94 × 76.2 cm) © Huma Bhabha. Photo: Rob McKeever
