Huma Bhabha - Editions & Works on Paper New York Wednesday, June 21, 2023 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Transcription of the artist speaking on Reconstructions for the Museum of Modern Art:

     

    Hello. My name is Huma Bhabha. My family lives in Pakistan. So I visit there every year.

     

    Karachi, where I'm from seems to be under constant construction. And there are lots of unfinished foundations, which I realized could work well as plinths for imaginary monumental sculptures.

     

    But the work is just as much influenced by the ruins that are being created every day by war and environmental destruction. I'm interested and saddened in how ruins are being freshly born constantly. The idea of monument and death is the ultimate raw material in art.

     

    I took black and white photographs of the landscape. And, I drew on them with India ink. The combination of the photographic detail and the drawing is then translated into a whole different medium through the process of etching with a very rich, dark, black ink. It's black, but it actually has a lot of different colors which make the black.

     

    I use discarded materials, and I fashion these materials into figures which recall sort of burnt-out images. They look distressed. They have eroded to just leaving a body part. But they also suggest phoenixes rising from ashes of destruction.

     

     

    Text by Jorge Luis Borges, an excerpt from The Immortal, a short story from his book Labyrinths:

     

    Everything was elucidated for me that day. The troglodytes were the Immortals; the rivulet of sandy water, the River sought by the horseman. As for the city whose renown had spread as far as the Ganges, it was some nine centuries since the Immortals had razed it. With the relics of its ruins they erected, in the same place, the mad city I had traversed: a kind of parody or inversion and also temple of the irrational gods who govern the world and of whom we know nothing, save that they do not resemble man. This establishment was the last symbol to which the Immortals condescended; it marks a stage at which, judging that all undertakings are in vain, they determined to live in thought, in pure speculation. They erected their structure, forgot it and went to dwell in caves. Absorbed in thought, they hardly perceived the physical world.

106

Reconstructions

2007
The complete set of 18 prints, including 16 photogravures and two woodblock prints, on Hahnemühle and Tosa Hanga papers, the full sheet and with full margins, the sheets loose (as issued), with title page, colophon, and text page by Jorge Luis Borges on Vellum, all contained in the original linen-covered portfolio box with embossed text in green.
four I. 22 3/4 x 30 3/8 in. (57.8 x 77.2 cm)
twelve I. 20 x 30 1/4 in. (50.8 x 76.8 cm) (two vertical)
two S. 25 x 34 in. (63.5 x 86.4 cm)
sixteen S. 29 1/4 x 36 1/2 in. (74.3 x 92.7 cm) (two vertical)

All signed, dated and numbered 29/35 in pencil (there were also 10 artist's proofs), published by Peter Blum Edition, New York.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for $12,700

Contact Specialist

Editions@phillips.com
212 940 1220

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 21 June 2023