Huma Bhabha: Welcome . . . to the one who came

A significant catalogue of Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha’s layered and nuanced sculptures and works on paper that center on a reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities.Through the artist’s fusion of materials and influences, Bhabha’s work unites the ancient and the futuristic, evoking both familiarity and otherworldliness. 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. This publication highlights 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. Published on the occasion of two concurrent exhibitions at David Zwirner in New York in 2024, Welcome . . . to the one who came includes a text by the curator Tausif Noor that investigates the theme of alienation in Bhabha’s work. In his essay, the curator and writer Peter Eleey situates her practice within the arc of art-historical models and contextualizes her first foray into working with cast iron.