Exhibition
Study #16. What is Love, Huma Bhabha
20 Jan 2017 – 8 Apr 2017
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Address
- Symes Mews
- 37 Camden High St
- London
- NW1 7JE
- United Kingdom
Study #16 looks in depth at the sculpture What is Love, 2013, by New York-based Pakistani artist Huma Bhabha from the David Roberts Collection.
About
The work comprises a white polystyrene bust painted with acrylic paint, oil stick and lipstick, atop a tall square cork column. The column’s four faces are carved in shallow relief; front, side and rear views of a grotesque figure with elongated breasts, torso, arms, fingers and legs. Drawing from diverse ancient and contemporary sources – from science-fiction to Picasso to African tribal sculpture – Bhabha’s totemic figure is universal rather than illustrative.
Additional selected works by Bhabha are presented alongside What is Love. Untitled, 2013, is a collage made at the same time as the sculpture, during a residency at the American Academy in Berlin. A skeletal head is vigorously painted on top of photograph taken by Bhabha of a local derelict site in the city. Bhabha has used this technique since 2006, absorbing different environments into her works and reworking them with her expressionless abstracted faces. A series of nine C-print photographs Untitled (2009) is similarly composed, this time using images of Bhabha’s native Karachi landscape, again drawn over with a series of anonymous monochrome heads. Finally, a second totemic sculpture from 2016 is loaned for the exhibition. Once is a slim black marble and Styrofoam pilaster body, with a crumpled clay face veiled with wire gauze.
A new text by writer Barbara Casavecchia studying What is Love is commissioned for the project.