Latest news with #HumaBhabha
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A sumptuous rehang, jumbo jellyfish and naive manly paintings – the week in art
The Wonder of Art New ways of seeing European art from Jan van Eyck to Cézanne and Picasso in a sumptuous rehang of one of the world's richest and deepest art museums. And all for free. Read the five-star review. National Gallery, London, from 10 May Chantal Joffe: The PrincePaintings of men and masculinity by this deliberately naive-looking, but in reality psychoanalytical, artist. Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange, Cornwall, from 15 May to 1 November Rene MatićNew photographs by one of the nominees for this year's Turner prize. Read the review. Arcadia Missa, London, until 3 June Barbara NichollsAbstract watercolours that look like giant jellyfish risen from the deep. Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London, until 21 June Martin CreedEverything Is Going to Be Alright – so Creed keeps telling us in neon, this time on the facade of a new arts centre. Camden Arts Projects, London, until 29 June After years of supposedly bringing good luck to whoever touched the breasts of Dublin's Molly Malone statue, they are now off-limits as the city council is notifying would-be gropers to leave her cleavage alone. Read the full story. Robbie Williams's art is 'incredibly bad' Desmond Morris's first film was an eye-opening surrealist love romp Artist Huma Bhabha is squaring up to Giacometti with wellies, skulls and teeth Japan's love hotels are wild A rare LS Lowry painting bought for £10 in 1926 sold for £800,000 An 'extreme' mould is threatening some of Denmark's most important paintings A Berlin art legend has put on a non-stop performance art piece for 25 years Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Artist Su Yu-Xin makes her paint from pearls, crystals and volcanic dust The Virgin and Child, possibly by Antonello da Messina, c 1460-69 You can see a modern world emerge from the middle ages in this painting. It's full of ripely gothic religious imagery, including the little angels with their stiff angular wings holding an ostentatiously bejewelled crown over Mary's head. Yet look at her face. Her features are depicted with stunning precision as she looks down with gentle affection and modest reverence at her holy child. No one could portray a face this accurately before the 15th century, and the skill and technique were first perfected in Flanders by Jan van Eyck. Yet this may not be a northern work at all. It's tentatively attributed by the National Gallery to Antonello da Messina, one of the first Italian artists to assimilate Van Eyck's discoveries. It was even said he journeyed from Naples to Bruges, befriended Van Eyck and stole his secrets. That is just a legend. Yet if this is by him, it shows his profound debt to the northern master. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Huma Bhabha review – ‘Giacometti is a foil to her flamboyance. She is today's Picasso'
A n artist has to ask big questions and have intense thoughts to get away with exhibiting among the profound masterpieces of Alberto Giacometti. I didn't give much for Huma Bhabha's chances. But she takes the Barbican's new daylit art gallery by storm. Grey morning light from windows that look across the brutalist ponds at St Giles Cripplegate pours through big holes in her 2019 sculpture Mask of Dimitrios. This roughly assembled human figure has plastic bags for breasts – not inflated but sagging pieces of dirty polythene – a metal chair for a skeleton enhanced by blackened dog bones, plaster arms and legs, a battered tray for a face, all tacked together over an inner emptiness. It is a troubling patchwork of a person, incomplete, unfinished – like us all. Just as Giacometti created universal images for his time, so Huma Bhabha creates them for ours. And the results are not pretty. Bhabha was born in Karachi in 1962 and lives in New York state. Giacometti died in Switzerland in 1966 after a life that shaped our very idea of seriousness in modern art. Starting out as a surrealist, creating hybrid forms at once erotic, violent and inexplicable, he became a primeval visionary whose thinned, starkly pointing or walking figures with their tall narrow faces express the reduced yet still-standing state of humanity after the second world war. The Giacometti Foundation has lent some of his purest, most archaeological figures. Four Women on a Base, cast in bronze in 1950, look like lucky Pompeiians who have walked out of the pyroclastic cloud of Vesuvius. Over by the window, another group of striding emaciated people are framed against concrete and sky – heroically anti-heroic icons of modern existence. 'This is intentional grotesquerie' … Huma Bhabha Encounters: Giacometti. But Bhabha makes poor Alberto seem museum-bound. You admire miniature figures by Giacometti standing to attention in their cases but are distracted by her rougher, rawer, terracotta-and-concrete shapes on the floor around them: a severed, chewed, gawping head, a bunch of gnarled human bones, a pair of swollen feet. Bhabha is in subtle dialogue with Giacometti – or is she ever so gently taking the piss? Her traumatised clay-covered heads, feet and other scattered parts mirror his charred ruins of humanity. Yet it is hard to tell if they are homages or parodies. As the exhibition unfolds, Giacometti becomes more and more a foil to her flamboyance, a skinny Polonius to her witty Hamlet, as her existential questions start to feel more urgent, restless and resonant than his. Giacometti, at least as represented here, is an artist who does one thing with monumental perfection. (His surrealist works would have told another story). Bhabha is an omnivorous eater and vomiter up of traditions and conventions, modern one moment, prehistoric the next, exhilaratingly embracing bad taste. In the gallery's antechamber are four massive statues with bodies that are solid rectangular blocks on which she has incised distorted outlines of body parts and interior organs. These gross, corporeal towers have titles including Mr Stone and, er, Member. This is intentional grotesquerie by an artist who is totally in control of her hideousness. Bhabha emerges as not a follower of Giacometti at all. With her savage embrace of what can only be called by that 20th-century word 'primitivism', her mixing of beauty and revulsion, her pastiches, her awe at the mystery of human existence, she is today's Picasso. Mask of Dimitrios, with its chaotic human image supported by a chair frame, is highly reminiscent of an Oceanian mask owned by Picasso, now in the Picasso Museum, Paris, which he enhanced by placing on a little wooden chair. Restless and resonant … Bhabha's Magic Carpet (2003). Photograph: Kerry McFate/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery She is not, however, a European artist, embracing the 'primitive' from elsewhere, but a Pakistani American who sees Europe as the outsider, the incomer, the brutal stranger. Near Giacometti's striding legs she displays her 2003 piece Magic Carpet, in which two booted white legs, bum in the air, stalk over a Mughal-style rug. Yet she looks for the same kind of universal language that Giacometti and Picasso found in their ransackings of world art and myth. Her powerful statue Scout looks like an ancient Egyptian Ka figure or sarcophagus that's been burned then buried – she created its charred look by applying paint to cork. The cultural cannibalism of her art is as insolent and boldly entitled as the great 20th-century modernists. Ugliness trumps elegance in this energising show. Instead of another depressing reminder that 21st-century art isn't a patch on 20th-century modernism, it proves the opposite – that artists today are still able to find the new and wild by recooking the many cultures of our ever-shifting world. The Reform chairman recently said Britain needs more patriotic statues and less 'crazy modern art'. Huma Bhabha's art is a punch in the face for such attitudes – and a satisfying punch it is. At the Barbican, London, 8 May-10 August
Time Out
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Encounters: Giacometti at Barbican
This three-part exhibition will bring together the haunting intensity of Alberto Giacometti's elongated figures into direct conversation with contemporary artists, launching in May 2025 with Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha's post-apocalyptic forms carved from materials including cork and Styrofoam. It will be followed by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum's quietly charged explorations of exile, fragility and surveillance in September and finally Lynda Benglis's wax and latex works in February 2026. These encounters will invite visitors to see the body and the world through radically shifting perspectives, reimagined through the raw materiality and psychological weight of each artist's response.
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.'
