Huma Bhabha’s work addresses themes of colonialism, war, displacement, and memories of place. Using found materials and the detritus of everyday life, she creates haunting human figures that hover between abstraction and figuration, monumentality and entropy. While her formal vocabulary is distinctly her own, Bhabha embraces a postmodern hybridity that spans centuries of geographic, art-historical, and cultural associations. Her work includes references to ancient Greek kouroi, Gandhara Buddhas, African sculpture, and Egyptian pharaohs. At the same time, it remains insistently modern, looking to Giacometti, Picasso, and Dubuffet for inspiration, as well as the artwork of A.R. Penck, Anselm Kiefer, and David Hammons. Television, sci-fi, horror movies, current events, and popular novels similarly find their way into her narratives.
