Huma Bhabha at M

Huma Bhabha was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the US at 19 to study art at the Rhode Island School of Design. She only had her first solo exhibition in New York when she was 41, in 2004. A good thing, she thinks: "If you don't get a lot of attention when you are young, you keep following your own path. That leads to places no one else goes."

I am not afraid of emotions. They make the work stronger

Huma Bhabha

That has made Bhabha a completely unique artist, who has developed her own language and aesthetic. She is best known for her impressive sculptures – terrifying, imposing creatures you can never be sure what they are now: monsters, animals, gods, humans, aliens... She also makes drawings on paper and photographs.

One thing all your works have in common, you immediately sense that they contain many layers. Not only physically, but also in terms of influences and themes.
Huma Bhabha: "Yes. There are a lot of different things going on in your mind. Over the course of your life, you store these and somehow they start dancing around with each other."

"When I start a new work, I often go back to the same influences, which I then revisit again and again. Images of ancient sculptures, African sculpture, German expressionism, Picasso, Giacometti... Also Gandhara art, a sculptural style that originated in the first centuries of our era in the region I come from – a mixture of Greek and Buddhist influences. Gandhara sits at the crossroads of the East and the Near West. Viewed from Pakistan, Greece is not that far away. That is where travellers and traders encountered each other. Back then, they were better at embracing the meeting of cultures, and how new things emerge from that. You had less of an idea of 'this is us'. I think nationalism is one of the worst things there is. It kills everything else."

"The work of my contemporary colleagues is also a deep influence. As an artist, you can steal from whoever you want (laughs)."

You previously mentioned James Ensor as one influence.
"Yes. I would call him an expressionist. In school, we had an excellent art history teacher, who also taught us about European art. Artists like Ensor appealed to me. The way he paints faces has been very influential to me: distorted, with unusual, intense colours... Nothing is normal, so to speak, everything is heightened. He manages to fuse the grotesque and caricatural with the realistic very well. He also manages to project his fears and emotions into his work. His compositions, the accents he adds, how he draws a face, all of it the result of how he looks at things. That is not how we look. No one looks in that way. That attracts me to his work."

"My own work also contains a lot of emotion. Lots of anxiety about endless wars. They never stop. Western troops had just about pulled out of Afghanistan, and then immediately war started in Ukraine. The damage it does, not just locally, but around the world... I am not a political artist, not an activist. I only want to testify about what I see, in the way that works for me. I am certainly not afraid of emotions, because they make the work stronger."

Science fiction and horror is another major influence on your work.
"Yes, some horror and sf films have had a great deal of impact on me. I became interested in the special effects, and I wanted to see if I could make those mutant creatures myself. Because I was so far from the mainstream, it didn't matter what I did anyway. Films from the 1980s were particularly inspiring to me: 'Alien', 'The Terminator', 'Scanners'."

In what way does ‘Alien’ appeal to you? The story? The monster, created by Swiss artist Giger? The film's visual language?
"All of it. The tension. Creativity. The images... Giger is wonderfully talented. He draws and paints like Michelangelo. But his designs for 'Alien' stand out for me. His other work great too, notwithstanding, but a bit too mannerist for my taste."

"'Alien' is incredible. The way the spaceship looks, the planet and the landscape... You really need imagination to create such a different world. Giger clearly took a great deal of inspiration from industrial design to shape the spaceship's interior. For the creature itself, I suspect he looked at insects and other animals. Work of a genius."

You work with polystyrene foam, rubber tyres, waste wood, as well as more traditional materials such as bronze and clay. Do you need specific materials for a specific work?
"No, I don't do that. In my early years, I did not have an unlimited budget which certainly also played a part in the choice of materials. I was attracted to the idea of collage and assemblage from an early age. You use whatever you can find, and whatever enables you to make what you want. Styrofoam, objets trouvés, pieces of wood, all of it felt natural to me."

"The materials have helped shape the development of the works. Just as the tools have. They had to be simple, because I am not a carpenter or welder and I still want to be able to do everything myself. In practical terms, you want the works to be strong and not disintegrate when you move them. They might look fragile, but they are not."

"I was in Mexico with my husband (the artist Jason Fox, ed.) at the end of 2000. He was there for a project of his own, and since I had time to spare, I started experimenting with clay in the hotel room. I found it a very rewarding material to work with. Back in New York, I ended up with clay that hardens by itself, without having to bake it. That worked for me because I like to find new ways to do something, quicker and easier so I can do it all myself. I then started making fixtures out of simple materials like chicken wire and wood. I applied clay to that, like a skin. That felt very natural, and I began to realise that this method would allow you to do a great deal. A lot of doors suddenly opened. I have always been interested in portraying people, I have always been good at it. I was inspired by Picasso's 'Head of a Woman’ and decided to make big heads out of clay."

‘The Ambitious One’, Huma Bhabha, 2021, privécollectie, courtesy of the artist & Xavier Hufkens, Brussel

Installation view ‘Against Time’, 2020, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art © Huma Bhabha, BALTIC, photo: Rob Harris

‘Impossible’, Huma Bhabha, 2021 (detail). Courtesy of the artist & Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, photo: Adam Reich

Untitled, Huma Bhabha, 2021, private collection. Courtesy of the artist & Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, photo: HV-studio

Untitled, Huma Bhabha, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, photo: HV-studio

Indestructible

"A lot of what I have just talked abut you happened once I had left New York City, because I could no longer afford to live there. I moved to Poughkeepsie, a small town in the Hudson Valley. The fact that not many people paid attention to my work gave me a great deal of freedom. That means that you don't compare yourself to others. Instead, you do what you feel like doing, which is very liberating. You don't care whether the work means something to other people, whether it will attract attention. This allowed me to develop the clay works to a level where they took on their own character."

Why is it so important for you to make your works your own?
"I make things, I like modest materials and I am not interested in appropriating work that I have not made with my own hands. Nor did I have the resources for it (laughs). When I started as an artist, in the late 1980s in New York, appropriation was very popular. When everyone around you is following the same path, I go the other way. Because as an artist, you want to do something that you feel has originality in it, though of course nothing is completely original."

So how did your bronze works come about?
"I love bronze, the way it looks, feels, ages. It is also almost indestructible. But for a long time, I simply couldn't afford it. For my first exhibition in a gallery, I wanted to make a bronze sculpture. I had a sculpture in clay, but when the company told us how much it would be to cast it in bronze, we said straight away that 'Okay, forget it' (laughs)."

How do you go about creating a new piece?
"Many people have very specific ideas. They make design plans, and the finished piece looks exactly as they intended. I can't work like that. I’ll have an idea, but I’ll figure out how to get to the best result as I go along. Each intervention leads to the next, and halfway through I am already on a completely different path than when I started. With me, awareness grows during the process, and the materials help dictate my decisions. I might try out different things and then end up back at my original idea. A lot has to do with the fact that I do everything myself. Your hands are part of the thinking-process."

South Park

Your drawings are another aspect of your work and you have often make them from photographs you have taken yourself. There are many layers and influences in this as well.
"In the late 1990s, I had to give up my workshop for a period of time. I then started drawing a lot at home. I was working as a receptionist at a graphics company. They had a good library there, so whenever I had some time, I would browse the books. My favourite was a work from the 1960s on Indian sculpture, with large black-and-white plates of three- and five-headed Shiva statues. I took a lot of ideas from that. Just as I did from Marvel's 'Sub-Mariner' series, from my husband's comic book collection. The drawing style is stunning and very inspiring to me. I also like Japanese anime, although I can't draw like those artists."

"There are even episodes of 'South Park' that I find works of art. The creators drew the first series themselves. Those are okay, but it became really great when they recruited talented people to do the drawings and colouring. You can't take your eyes off it."

"All those influences, just as with the sculptures, are in your head, shaping what you make yourself. Karachi, the place where I grew up, is also very present in my drawings. I often draw from photos I took in Karachi over the past 15 years, close to the beach and the neighbourhood where I lived. My earliest memories are the rides to school, ten minutes through that flat desert landscape. There are a few cacti, palm trees and desert bushes, but otherwise it is arid, desolate and beautiful. I am not nostalgic, but the colours of that era are in me. I carry that landscape within me."

"There are things in Karachi that I like that probably mean nothing to anyone else. Like a wide pothole in the pavement. Things that I find very endearing, and that can only exist there. I then take pictures of that."

"Every year, there are more and more buildings. One year, I’ll take a picture of the foundations, the next year they’ve added a level.... Karachi feels like an urban ruin, just as so many cities in the developing world. Because when you build a house, you start with the foundation, and then you wait until you have money again, and build some more. I find all those unfinished foundations particularly interesting. I see them as pedestals for gigantic, monumental works. That's why I started drawing based on those photographs of that landscape. I also started making sculptures and photographed them in the same landscape. Because of the camera's point of view, you get the feeling that the works are very big, but in real life they are around sixty centimetres tall."

When is a piece finished according to you?
"There is certainly always a point when I have to stop (laughs). You can spend too long working on things, which I sometimes do. Then you have to take something away so that it looks fresh again. I like rough surfaces. I regularly think to myself ‘oh, does it not look too polished?’ For other people, the “too polished” is probably the last thing they would think of (laughs)."

"Karachi also has that rawness to it. Personally, I am very attached to that, and I also think I understand it. I want to put that feeling in the works, and I think I have succeeded in that. To some extent at least."

Finally, you also use humour into your work. Why is that?
"My own sense of humour, perhaps (laughs). If you exaggerate something a great deal, it will at times become witty. Maybe not to everyone, but at least to me. That's why I love horror and sf, there's always humour in it. When there has been an explosion, for example, all you see is a smouldering trainer, with a shin sticking out. That's horrifying, of course, but at the same time pretty funny."

"You should never take yourself too seriously. I see myself as someone who works with her hands and develops her skills, but I certainly don't want to appear pretentious, because I don't like that. Humour is a good weapon against pretentiousness."

Huma Bhabha at M

Huma Bhabha is an figure of international reference in contemporary visual art. She is known for her distinct visual language, which focuses on the human figure in all its expressive forms. Her monumental, piercing figures convey strength yet at the same time visualise man's vulnerability in the world.

M is organising the first Belgian museum exhibition of her unique body of work. We present sculptures and large works on paper from the past 15 years, drawn from public and private collections at home and abroad. The exhibition is a collaboration with MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, where Huma Bhabha's work will be on display from November 2023.