Huma Bhabha

ATM Gallery, Berlin 
Acquired directly from the above in 2006

London, The Saatchi Gallery, USA Today: New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery, 2006, pp. 52-53, illustrated in colour
London, The Saatchi Gallery, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, 2010

Meghan Dailey, The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, London 2009, pp. 138-139, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The illustration fails to fully convey the three dimensionality of the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's choice of medium and working process.
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Theatrical and disquieting, the present work is a dramatic example of Huma Bhaba’s monumental assemblage-style sculptures. These humorous constructions draw on associations of ‘Primitivism’ and tribal deities with their naïve and roughly-hewn forms, yet they simultaneously transcend such a simplistic interpretation through their powerful architectonic presence.  The trajectory of Bhaba’s artistic output has ranged from drawing and print-making, to her career-defining totemic sculptures of which the present work is a striking example.

Poignantly titled Waiting for a Friend this towering figure teeters apprehensively on spindly metal pins which support swelling white clay thighs. Rivulets of blood-red paint bubble up from the ‘neck’ of the figure, creating a visual metaphor of the forced marriage of materials. Atop a wooden rod is a delicately carved, child-like head with an expression of peaceful repose, so unsettlingly at odds with the crude form of its bulbous body.

The piece is typical of Bhaba’s oeuvre, exhibiting the artist’s deliberate subversion of the traditional values of material purity. Her figurative creations are conceived through a fusion of found objects, street debris and rubble, drawing on the discarded elements of urban living which are then moulded by the artist’s hand to create anthropomorphic ‘beings’ that exude their own autonomous history. These commanding works appear to be in a constant state of flux between creation and destruction, a characteristic that defines Bhaba’s work as a uniquely modern interpretation of sculptural practice.