Collection Studies are a series of focused case studies of works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.
As part of the Collection Studies (formerly, Study Series) DRAF presents painted sculpture What is Love (2013) by Huma Bhabha. Additional selected works by Bhabha are presented alongside What is Love. This includes, Untitled (2013), a collage made at the same time as the sculpture, during a residency at the American Academy in Berlin. This work shows a skeletal head vigorously painted on top of a photograph taken by Bhabha of a local derelict site in the city. Bhabha has used this technique since 2006, absorbing different environments into her works and reworking them with her expressionless abstracted faces.
Untitled (2009), a series of nine C-print photographs, also from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, is composed similarly, this time using images of Bhabha’s native Karachi landscape, again drawn over with a series of anonymous monochrome heads. Finally, a second totemic sculpture, Once (2016), is loaned for the exhibition. This sculpture is formed of a slim black marble and Styrofoam pilaster body, with a crumpled clay face veiled with wire gauze.
A text in the Collection Studies series by Barbara Casavecchia studying What is Love is commissioned for the project.
