Latest news with #DavidZwirner
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘You might find it scary': artist Huma Bhabha squares up to Giacometti with wellies, skulls and teeth
Two tonnes of Huma Bhabha's works greet you before you even reach the entrance of her new exhibition at the Barbican in London. They are four powerful ancient-looking giants, with rough-hewn surfaces, gouged and blackened (the effect achieved by first carving in cork, then casting in patinated bronze). With their enormous skull heads towering above you, baring pincers and rows of teeth, it's as if you've stumbled on the set for an apocalyptic sci-fi film. 'It seems they're suddenly here, as if they've just come out of the elevator,' Bhabha says affectionately. Bhabha is here to install her work alongside 10 sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, her first public display in the UK since 2020. 'Encounters: Giacometti' is the first in a three-part exhibition series organised with the Giacometti Foundation, bringing contemporary artists – Bhabha being the first – into dialogue with the 20th-century Swiss sculptor in a brand new gallery at the Barbican, once the centre's brasserie. It's a bright L-shaped space on the second floor with wide views across the Barbican estate's dyed-green waters. View image in fullscreen Magic Carpet, 2003 by Huma Bhabha. Photograph: Kerry McFate/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery Bhabha first encountered Giacometti's work as an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design. Years later, when she made her first artwork sales, a Giacometti book was the first thing she bought with the money. 'I was nervous of course to be in the same room with Giacometti', Bhabha confesses, as we sit on the terrace talking, her works looking down on us. 'But the works seem to be compatible, they're enjoying each other's company.' 'Encounters: Giacometti' emphasises the shared sensibilities between the two artists: angry, angsty figures that evoke a sense of ruin, destruction and existential anxiety; rough, urgently worked surfaces; stretched, fragmented and dismembered body parts – harbingers of desolation in a horrible reality. 'Giacometti's work was like that because of what he had experienced and the times he lived in, and I'm also aware of similar things. It's interesting how times don't change,' Bhabha says. 'It's the world we live in, it's full of death. The amount of manmade destruction can really overpower you. It is hard to get away from it.' There is synergy between their ideas and responses to the horrors of the world, but the results are often radically different: Bhabha's dense, furious, cataclysmic; Giacometti's awkward, vulnerable, delicate. Both artists crib classical poses from traditional sculpture: standing, seated, and reclining figures, but experiment with non-traditional expressions for them, merging the human form with all the other stuff that surrounds life. As Giacometti once put it: 'I don't sculpt people, I sculpt solitude.' Though Bhabha has long acknowledged Giacometti as an influence, 'I'm not interested in re-doing another artist's work. It's an absorbed kind of influence – I might think of him when I'm making a nose, or a head, or opening up a chest cavity. I am very attracted to the way he applies the clay and his mark-marking, which is almost graffiti-like.' View image in fullscreen 'I'm not interested in re-doing another artist's work' … Special Guest Star by Huma Bhabha. Photograph: Kerry McFate/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery Bhabha grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the US to study art, encouraged by her parents – her mother was a talented but unrecognised artist and Bhabha grew up surrounded by her paintings and drawings at home. She initially trained as a painter and printmaker, but in the 1990s after graduating began to put found objects together into three-dimensional pieces. 'Even now technically my work is assemblage, I put different objects together from different places, and somehow they feel they have always been together.' After 13 years living in New York, Bhabha and her husband (the artist Jason Fox) moved upstate to the more affordable Poughkeepsie, a small town in the Hudson River Valley region, where she still lives. When she first moved there, she worked for two years as a finisher for a taxidermist. It proved to be an important time. 'The way they construct their dioramas and build armatures was very influential on my work at that point. I adapted how they used chickenwire and built armatures with wood.' She also amassed a collection of skulls, horns, and bones destined for the dump that still appear in her works today. 'They thought it was funny that I collected that stuff. 'I've been collecting stuff for a long time – I don't go out looking for a specific thing, I have a lot of chunks of wood, pieces of rusted metal, I'm very attracted to stuff like that. In America you find all kinds of things – people just take off their clothes and leave them there.' This mashup of materials is what gives Bhabha's work its contemporary beat, while still incorporating traditional bronze, plaster, terracotta and clay. A pair of black rubber boots she found abandoned behind her first home in Poughkeepsie became the earliest work included in the Barbican show: a sculpture made for her first solo exhibition in 2004. The artist recently purchased it back at an auction. To the thick, industrial boots she added truncated legs, sculpted intuitively with foam spray then plaster, painted in contrasting skin tones. The boots appear to levitate on a raised plexi platform; under the feet is a remnant of a carpet from her childhood home in Pakistan. 'It's very much about being in love.' View image in fullscreen 'I've been collecting stuff for a long time' … Nothing Falls by Huma Bhabha. Photograph: Kerry McFate/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery 'My work is very emotional and emotive,' Bhabha says. A work titled Special Guest Star lies on a tilted platform. It too represents a body, reclining or crawling up from the ground along a plywood plank. Its head consists of the inside of deer's horns (from the taxidermy days), the body is Bhabha's old scrunched-up T-shirt. In a 'nod to Jasper Johns' a paintbrush is intended as a vagina; ornamental tin scraps a roof are slippers. 'I'm trying to make my own language.' A large seated figure, Mask of Dimitrios, almost collides with the low ceiling. Its clay legs are a direct reference to Giacometti's mottled, pock-marked textures; two plastic bags are suspended in a void where the chest should be. 'Initially I thought of them as breasts, but they also could be lungs'. It's humorous, and gnarly, but Bhabha has become the queen of the grotesque. 'I don't see the grotesque as a negative, it's fine!' The mask-like face is in fact a mould for a different work, salvaged from the foundry which cast Bhabha's sculptures. Works are often spawned from each other, adding to the unpredictable evolution of Bhabha's work. Another important reference for Bhabha is cinema – especially the handcrafted special effects of 1980s horror films, though she doesn't like 'camp'. 'Sci-fi and horror is a genre I've enjoyed most of my life, I guess I have a high tolerance for it – and there's not much else to do where I live. It's all CGI now which is OK, but there's a bit of that density lost, it feels hollow.' Her monstrous, hybrid forms are freighted with heated desires and dark humour, collecting in serried layers of materials. It's an intense viewing experience. 'You might find it scary or too confrontational, but you're still attracted to it, you can't just walk away from it – that's important for me, to keep you coming back.'
South China Morning Post
26-03-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
US-linked galleries at Art Basel Hong Kong unfazed by potential trade war impact
Galleries with links to the United States that are taking part in Art Basel Hong Kong have said they are unconcerned by the trade war potentially affecting business, adding that they expect sales to improve from last year's event. Advertisement The city's edition of the international art fair welcomed 240 galleries from 42 countries and regions, a slight drop of two participants from last year. It is among a string of government-sponsored mega-events grouped under the city's 'Art March' promotional drive. The event at Wan Chai's Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre opened to VIPs on Wednesday. Patrons holding public day tickets will be able to attend from 2pm on Friday, before the art fair wraps up on Sunday. David Zwirner, founder of his eponymous gallery, which operates in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong, said he had not observed any effect on business resulting from the US-China trade war. Advertisement 'All the tariff talk can affect us, of course, but since it's all been talk so far, nothing has really bitten,' the regular Art Basel Hong Kong participant said, adding that the trade war had also not affected the potential buying sentiment of collectors.
South China Morning Post
26-03-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
International visitors return as Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 gets off to a good start
The long-awaited green shoots of recovery have tentatively poked their heads above ground at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong. Advertisement The first sales were reported within hours of Wednesday's opening, which was restricted to invited VIPs only. Mainland Chinese collectors were seen to be buying despite new economic headwinds and uncertainties amid an intensifying trade war with the United States and economic challenges at home. At the booth of gallery David Zwirner, the Shenzhen-based Corridor Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded by collector Wang Yongli and investor-philanthropist Li Feng, paid US$1.6 million for a three-metre-high (10-foot) oil painting by Belgian painter Michaël Borremans. Titled Bob, it shows a mysterious figure wearing a padded costume looking away from the viewer. Bob (2025), by Michaël Borremans, was sold for US$1.6 million by David Zwirner. Photo: Courtesy of David Zwirner 'What is nice is that this painting, which is supposed to be the star piece here [at our booth], was sold to a Shenzhen private foundation,' said David Zwirner, the gallery's owner.
South China Morning Post
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Showtime: 4 unmissable art exhibitions to keep you cultured
Emma McIntyre: Among My Swan Tiepolo pink (2024) by Emma McIntyre. Photo: courtesy Emma McIntyre / Château Shatto (Los Angeles) / David Zwirner (New York) New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based artist Emma McIntyre presents 'Among My Swan', her first solo show in Asia. Known for vivid, chromatic abstractions, McIntyre's paintings blend oils with unconventional materials such as oxidised iron to create deeply textured, transformative works. This series explores the alchemical possibilities of painting, drawing connections between the artist's instincts, the forces of nature and art history. Each piece is part of an evolving network of discovery, reflecting her protean and experimental approach to the medium. David Zwirner, 5-6/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central, March 25 to May 10; Lynne Drexler: The Seventies Lynne Drexler, Burst Blossom (1971). Photo: White Cube/ Frankie Tyska White Cube presents the first Asian exhibition of works by the late American painter affiliated with the second-generation abstract expressionist movement. 'Lynne Drexler: The Seventies' features never-before-seen chromatic landscapes created during a transformative decade in her career. Influenced by impressionism, fauvism and classical music, Drexler's tessellated compositions radiate kinetic energy and reflect her deep connection to the natural world. This exhibition follows her solo show at White Cube's Mason's Yard in London, marking a continuation of the gallery's representation of her archive.
