Huma Bhabha

In both her sculptures from the mid-1990s, and her new drawings Huma Bhabha reinvents the human head, deconstructing and reconstructing an archetype in which she gathers and transforms various art-historical typologies. From masks, technological portraits of archaic beings, to drawings, which mark a return to an expressionistic mode of depiction of fantasmal faces, Bhabha seeks inspiration from very different sources,  tribal art, science-fiction, combining them to arrive at a new kind of figuration and constructing the human face as a site in which all the possibilities of the expressive can be played out.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Players" at the Collezione Maramotti, the book includes the pictures of the artworks on show and a number of images accompanying the texts by Mario Diacono and by the anthropologist Giancarlo M.G. Scoditti, which explores the concept of  mask as an expressive form related to a mental image that reveals itself in a ritual context, in many tribal cultures.
The volume also includes a complete biography of Huma Bhabha, artist of Pakistan origin who has been living and working in the United States from the Eighties.

Reggio Emilia, Collezione Maramotti, February - April, 2012