ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents an exhibition of large-scale, photo- based works from 2010 and 2011 by artist Huma Bhabha, on view from Thursday, December 8, 2011, through Sunday, February 5, 2012.
Huma Bhabha is well known for her visceral, assemblage-based sculptures. Built of cast-off materials, Bhabha’s sculptures are figurative, often taking the form of conventional classical genres like portrait busts and drawn from an eclectic range of influences and art-historical references ranging from classical and African sculpture to the works of modernists like Picasso, Brancusi, and Giacometti. The sculptures also recall elements of the dystopic pop cultural visions of science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.
Bhabha’s Aspen Art Museum exhibition focuses exclusively on a series of large-scale, painted and collaged photographs. Beginning with photographs she has taken of desolate landscapes and abandoned construction sites in disparate locations, Bhabha layers hallucinatory streaks of ink in saturated colors and sharp, gestural figuration that lend the works the same spontaneity and raw materiality as her sculptures. Often combining figuration and landscape, Bhabha offers the viewer a state of ruin that is neither past, present, nor future. The materials within the work allude both to decay and trauma while connoting reuse and rebirth through the creative process.
Huma Bhabha was born in 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Recently, she was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and participated in an exhibition of sculpture at City Hall Park in New York organized by the Public Art Fund. In 2008 she participated in the 7th Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, Korea, and received the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Emerging Artist Award. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium; MoMA PS1, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo in Guadalajara, Mexico.
