Huma Bhabha: What is Love

Study #16 looks in depth at the sculpture What is Love, 2013, by New York-based Pakistani artist Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) from the David Roberts Collection. The work comprises a figure made of cork and green polystyrene and carved in the round. The head and body are painted and drawn over with acrylic paint, oil stick and lipstick. The figure is carved in shallow relief, 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.