Huma Bhabha (born 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan) is a Pakistani-American artist best known for her haunting, expressive sculptures and works on paper.

She moved to the United States in 1981 to study art, earning a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1989. Though she originally trained as a painter and printmaker, she gradually gravitated to sculpture and assemblage, experimenting with found materials such as cork, styrofoam, wire, clay and industrial detritus.

Bhabha’s work often inhabits an uncanny space between the human and the grotesque. Her figures appear wounded or fragmented, evoking themes of mortality, displacement and the uncanny. She has said she wants her pieces to function as “characters” that carry psychological weight through their physical form.

Her work has been exhibited widely, including in solo and group shows at MoMA PS1, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (notably her We Come in Peace rooftop commission in 2018), the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Barbican in London in 2025 in a dialogue with Giacometti’s work. Her pieces are held in major public collections, including Tate Modern, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Centre Pompidou.

Huma Bhabha

Pakistani

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Artist

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