Untitled
2008

Although Huma Bhabha is known for her figurative sculptures, she was trained in painting and printmaking, and often works with photography as well. Like her large-scale, anthropomorphic sculptures, Untitled takes the human body as its primary subject and point of reference. Here, the viewer is oriented at ground-level, peering out at a desolate landscape and a lurid red sky through the frame of two legs. This image belongs to a series of prints in which Bhabha used pen, brush, and india ink to draw on black-and-white photographs she had shot of stalled construction sites and deserts on a recent trip to her native Pakistan. Drawing by hand over the printed mages allowed Bhabha to insert a powerful human presence into these forsaken landscapes. As she remarked: “I started out with the feet, which in the context of the photographs looked enormous—as though they belonged to giants or were close-ups of monumental sculpture.”