Exhibition

Huma Bhabha: Distant Star

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Now Open

June 13—July 26, 2025

Opening Reception

Friday, June 13, 6–8 PM

Location

Paris

108, rue Vieille du Temple

75003 Paris

Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat: 11 AM-7 PM

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star, David Zwirner, Paris, 2025

David Zwirner is pleased to present new work by Huma Bhabha at the gallery’s Paris location. Distant Star features six sculptures and a series of large-scale drawings, presenting new directions and materials that expand the scope of the artist’s practice. The exhibition coincides with a two-person presentation of Bhabha’s work in dialogue with sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, on view at the Barbican Centre in London until August 2025.

Distant Star is the gallery’s third exhibition of Bhabha’s work, and it follows her two concurrent solo shows in New York in 2024. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in Paris since 2009.

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Huma Bhabha: Distant Star

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star, David Zwirner, Paris, 2025

In the main gallery are five sculptures made using Bhabha’s characteristic arsenal of multivalent techniques; she begins with cork, which she then carves, gouges, paints over, and otherwise marks up. Notably, these works also introduce new formal elements and sculptural processes: to create these sculptures, the artist rubs wet clay atop areas of these previously carved surfaces, adding an additional layer of coloristic and textural dimensionality.

“The relationship between my drawings and sculptures has evolved naturally, they are made side by side, related not in a literal way but rather as an absorbing of each other.”

—Huma Bhabha in conversation with Sheena Wagstaff

Surrounding the sculptures, Bhabha presents a group of ink-and-collage drawings made atop photographs she has taken. An enduring and crucial aspect of her practice, Bhabha’s large-format multimedia drawings beckon the viewer with their exaggerated, ghoulish visages and unabashedly confrontational gazes.

Each of these large-scale works depicts a single hooded portrait—a new motif in the artist’s visual repertory that draws a connection between thirteenth- and fourteenth-century depictions of saints and Franciscan monks by artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, and Margaritone d’Arezzo and the ubiquitous symbol of the modern-day hoodie.

“Beginning with pictures she has taken … she layers the images with hallucinatory streaks of ink in saturated colors and sharp, gestural figuration, lending the works the same spontaneity and raw materiality as her sculptures.”

—Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and Director, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star, David Zwirner, Paris, 2025

Bhabha's formally innovative practice pulls from a wide range of references, from those that span the history of art—including Egyptian reliquaries, African sculpture, Greek kouroi, Gandharan Buddhas, as well as the work of such modern and contemporary artists as Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz West, among others—to quotidian influences such as science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life.

“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.”

—Jonathan Jones, critic

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star, David Zwirner, Paris, 2025

“Because it is subjected to extreme injunctions … contemporary sculpture sometimes struggles to remember the buried realm that forged its legacy. In contrast, Huma Bhabha’s monstrous creatures display a type of formal vocabulary and creativity that is both timeless and marked by our own obsessions - incomprehensible unless sifted through the lens of the century.”

—Numa Hambursin, Artistic Director, Fondation GGL, Montpellier

In Bhabha's drawings, the facial features of the figures are omitted, save for black-rimmed, collaged eyes that gaze out at the viewer with a direct stare, relaying a sense of their varied endurance; with eeriness, foreboding, and humor, they bridge the divide between what is monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human.

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2025 (detail)

“Bhabha appreciates how a found object can be both material and content, and seems to take special pleasure in layering together sources of inspiration that camouflage each other in combination.... Whatever structural and thematic value may be found in the packaging and trash that feature in Bhabha’s … sculptures, they are themselves also allegories for the consumption and digestion active in her artistic mind.”

—Peter Eleey, Curator-at-Large at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in Huma Bhabha: Welcome . . . to the one who
came, David Zwirner Books, 2025

In the works on view, passages of material are juxtaposed with densely carved areas that delineate limbs or scarred flesh, resulting in forms that are embodied in a state of disorder, erosion, and entropy. They appear to be emerging from—or encased in—rubble and debris. Some works possess skeletal heads fashioned from salvaged animal skulls, clay, chicken wire, Styrofoam, and cork. These sculptures stand on black wooden plinths, further lending them the feeling of a mortal relic or an artifact from another world.

Huma Bhabha, Learn Something, 2025 (detail)

“I don’t see the grotesque as a negative…. 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.”

—Huma Bhabha, interviewed in The Guardian, 2025

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2025 (detail)

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star, David Zwirner, Paris, 2025

Viewed together, Bhabha’s work in two and three dimensions creates a dynamic dialogue that amplifies the tension between the ephemeral and the monumental. This interplay invites viewers to engage more fully with the layered psychological, art historical, and conceptual depth of her art.

Huma Bhabha, Answer Nothing, 2025 (detail)

A solitary beacon in the gallery’s front room is the titular cast-iron sculpture Distant Star, which stands tall like a mysterious sentinel. The sculpture appears to be eternally watching and waiting, suspended in a state of petrified solemnity. Its living rust-orange surface will continue to oxidize and evolve in appearance, affirming the notion of time as a primordial sculptor’s tool—a concept that Bhabha has repeatedly returned to in her oeuvre.

“Bhabha’s excursion into cast iron … emphasizes in physical terms the artist’s métier of producing what she has termed ‘instant ruins,’ a phrase that is particularly apt for describing sculpture, particularly monumental sculpture, which historically was created with the intention to remain intact for centuries.”

—Tausif Noor, critic and curator, in Huma Bhabha: Welcome . . . to the one who
came, David Zwirner Books, 2025

Huma Bhabha, Distant Star, 2025 (detail)

Installation view, Encounters: Giacometti, Barbican Centre, London, 2025. Photo by Max Creasy

Installation view, Encounters: Giacometti, Barbican Centre, London, 2025. Photo by Max Creasy

Installation view, Encounters: Giacometti, Barbican Centre, London, 2025. Photo by Max Creasy

Installation view, Encounters: Giacometti, Barbican Centre, London, 2025. Photo by Max Creasy

From May through August 2025, Bhabha’s work is featured in Encounters: Giacometti at the Barbican Centre in London. Curated by Shanay Jhaveri, the exhibition includes significant works by Giacometti on loan from the Fondation Giacometti, installed alongside work by Bhabha, including an edition of Distant Star, after which the Paris presentation is titled.

“It is precisely in considering the intention of an artistic imaginary like Bhabha's—in which the continual dialogue between past and present can serve to resist the simple categorizations of modern, post-colonial, postmodern, global, local, etc.—that allow museums … to invite a more sustained and critical discourse over common binaries and dichotomies.”

—Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican Centre, London

Installation view, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star, David Zwirner, Paris, 2025

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