Huma Bhabha’s monumental bronze rises in Washington’s revitalized sculpture garden

Huma Bhabha’s We Come in Peace rises from the newly revitalized sculpture garden at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, a monumental presence that commands the landscape with an unsettling grace. Cast in bronze and standing over twelve feet tall, the work emerges from an unusual genesis: Bhabha first hand carved the figure in cork and Styrofoam before the material underwent its transformation into metal, a process that preserves the rawness of the artist’s initial gesture within the sculpture’s permanent form.

The work’s title draws from Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, invoking that moment of first contact and the anxiety it provokes. Yet Bhabha’s towering figure, with its pinkish head and turquoise torso rendered in oxidised bronze, speaks to something far more complex than cinematic aliens. The sculptural form engages a long lineage extending from ancient Eastern statuary through Western classicism to modernism, its many faced quality raising questions about what constitutes the familiar and what the foreign, the native and the other. Originally conceived for a rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the sculpture finds new resonance in this outdoor setting, where seasons shift the light across its surface and the work enters into dialogue with the garden itself.

The Hirshhorn’s newly enhanced sculpture garden provides the work its proper stage, allowing Bhabha’s bronze figure to stand as both an interrogation of sculptural tradition and a meditation on encounter, on the moment when two worlds meet and the assumptions that moment unsettles. The sculpture remains on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.

Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).