Huma Bhabha: Welcome . . . to the One Who Came

A significant catalogue of Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha’s layered and nuanced sculptures and works on paper that center on a reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities.

Through the artist’s fusion of materials and influences, Bhabha’s work unites the ancient and the futuristic, evoking both familiarity and otherworldliness. Her formally innovative practice pulls from a wide range of references, from those that span the history of art to quotidian influences such as science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life. Instinctive and rigorous, her work brings diverse aesthetic, cultural, and psychological touchstones into contact with matters of surface, materiality, and formal construction. This publication highlights Bhabha’s ability to move between a wide range of media and forms, creating deeply resonant hybrid figures that seem to simultaneously dwell in the past, present, and future.

Published on the occasion of two concurrent exhibitions at David Zwirner in New York in 2024, Welcome . . . to the one who came includes a text by the curator Tausif Noor that investigates the theme of alienation in Bhabha’s work. In his essay, the curator and writer Peter Eleey situates her practice within the arc of art-historical models and contextualizes her first foray into working with cast iron.

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Huma Bhabha came to the United States in 1981 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, from which she received her BFA in 1985. She later studied at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York, from which she received her MFA in 1989. The artist presently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Peter Eleey is a curator and writer based in New York. He is curator-at-large at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in China, where his exhibitions have included Maria Lassnig: Happy Martian (2023), Luc Tuymans: The Past (2024), and Anicka Yi: There Is Another Evolution, But in This One (2024), co-organized with the Leeum Museum of Art. He previously served as chief curator of MoMA PS1 in New York, where he organized more than forty exhibitions between 2010 and 2020, including Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories (2012).

Tausif Noor is a critic and curator whose writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Aperture, frieze, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, as well as various artist catalogues and edited volumes. He is the recipient of a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Based in Oakland, California, he is a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley.