Exhibit of the week: Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories

Huma Bhabha’s sculptures appear to belong to some other time, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. Born in Pakistan and educated in the U.S., the 50-year-old artist uses “throwaway materials” like Styrofoam and wire mesh to construct totemic figures that evoke a distant past but speak as well about an unsettling future. Outside Bhabha’s first solo museum show, two 8-foot-tall anthropoids stand like sentinels in a courtyard. To the visitor’s left, God of Some Things is an only partially articulated female figure carved from a rectangular solid. To the right, Ghost of Humankindness wears “a crumbling clay mask of a face” atop a “blocky” body made of packing materials. Separately, each figure is “arresting.” Together, “they seem to bookend the history of figurative sculpture, from ancient fertility figures to what could be the last vestiges of the human race.”

“Time has played a central role in Bhabha’s work in more ways than one,” said Sameer Reddy in The Wall Street Journal. Though she’s been producing work since she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, in 1985, curators and collectors have only in recent years taken notice of the way her figures—or “monsters,” as she calls them—straddle past, present, and future. Her interest in science fiction might explain why Cousin (2012), which has a cork body that looks like stone from a distance, is topped by a pink Styrofoam head that “suggests a retro rendering of a space alien.” Another figure, Sleeper (2005), appears ancient when viewed from the front but reveals the contemporary elements of its structure when viewed from the side.

The sense of timelessness that Bhabha achieves is “key to her recycled, Rodin-meets–Mad Max aesthetic,” said Christian Viveros-Fauné in The Village Voice. The show’s “standouts,” There Is No Killing What Can’t Be Killed and the title work, both made this year, are “magpie” creations that I’m unlikely to forget anytime soon. They are not only menacing; they “do a number on the generally modest expectations surrounding contemporary art.” Such works “give the lie to the idea that emerging artists can’t be bothered to make grand statements today.” Made of such cast-off materials as scrap metal, burlap, a radial tire, and more Styrofoam, they illuminate “contemporary man’s tragic flaws by making art from our own toxic leavings.”

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