Fragments of Memory: Huma Bhabha’s Sculptural Vision in Florence
A contemplative new work by the renowned sculptor takes centre stage in a sweeping exhibition that reframes the fragment as a profound artistic object, tracing its trajectory from ancient civilisations to the contemporary moment.
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Within the storied chambers of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, a transformative exhibition unfolds, one that interrogates the profound poetic and conceptual possibilities held within fragmented forms. Broken: The Power of the Fragment presents a sweeping historical narrative that spans millennia, drawing together more than eighty extraordinary works that collectively challenge our understanding of incompleteness as a state of aesthetic and philosophical richness.
Among the luminous assembly of artworks on display stands Huma Bhabha’s Untamed, a sculpture realised in 2024 that exemplifies the artist’s distinctive practice of excavating meaning from fragmentation and disruption. Bhabha’s sculptural vocabulary, characterised by its raw materiality and enigmatic formal language, engages profoundly with the exhibition’s central thesis, revealing how the fragment transcends mere loss to become an autonomous object suffused with contemplative power.
A Lineage of Artistic Fragmentation
The exhibition orchestrates a magnificent dialogue across centuries and cultures, assembling treasures from ancient Egypt and classical Greece alongside masterworks by Renaissance luminaries and sculptural visionaries of subsequent generations. Michelangelo’s studies, the elegant distillations of Rodin’s practice, and works by Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Francesco Vezzoli and Danh Vo create a richly layered conversation that reveals the fragment as a recurrent motif throughout art historical discourse. Each work functions as a meditation on transformation, time’s inevitable passage, and the traces of memory that persist within broken forms.
Memory Rendered in Stone and Form
Rather than presenting the fragment as a forlorn remnant of something once complete and perfect, the exhibition reconceptualises it as an object possessed of autonomous dignity and spiritual significance. The works assembled here embody traces of memory, bearing witness to the narratives, cultures and sensibilities from which they emerge. They suggest that incompleteness can be, paradoxically, a state of profound wholeness, where meaning crystallises precisely through what remains absent or obscured.
Curated in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Broken: The Power of the Fragment extends its reach across the Atlantic, forging an essential dialogue between American and European perspectives on contemporary and historical artistic practice. The exhibition remains open at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through January 24, 2027, offering an unparalleled opportunity to experience how artists across epochs have found transcendence within rupture and beautiful possibility within loss.
Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).
