Huma Bhabha’s first show of sculpture at David Zwirner, “Welcome … to the one who came,” consists of seven sculptures — four figures and three heads — all radiating ruination. Sparsely installed in the two spaces on the gallery’s ground floor, they show Bhabha decisively expanding both the means and expression of her work, although it should be said that our troubled times all but rise to meet her efforts. They seem implicitly antiwar, and, in their compressed forms, the inverse of Thomas Hirschhorn’s equally excellent “Fake It, Fake It — Till you Fake It,” a sprawling excess of violence, destruction and advanced technology recently seen at Gladstone.
Rummaging through dead civilizations, Bhabha, who was born in Pakistan in 1962 and came to the United States in 1981, conjures ravaged idols that we know on sight. They have the four-sided rigidity of both enthroned Egyptian pharaohs and Transformers action figures. Bhabha achieves this effect by defining limbs and torsos with deep incisions but rarely in the round. (They can bring to mind Brancusi.)