With its sprawling green punctuated by skyline views, Brooklyn Bridge Park has seen its share of monumental public art. Yet Huma Bhabha’s Before The End—a quartet of towering bronze figures scattered across Pier 3 Uplands—manages to stake its claim with an otherworldly intensity. These are not so much sculptures as oracles, ambiguous visitors that could have emerged from beneath the park itself or perhaps arrived from another planet.
At first glance, Bhabha’s hulking, eight-foot-tall forms feel ancient, their surfaces pockmarked and eroded as if by millennia of wind and water. Titles like Feel the Hammer and Mr. Stone compound this impression, nodding to an imagined geological or mythical past. Yet, spending more time with these figures reveals a jarring duality. They are also unmistakably modern—simultaneously dystopian, comic, and surreal.
Bhabha, a virtuoso of materials and scale, casts these works in bronze from an assemblage of carved cork and detritus. The material history is felt everywhere: craggy crevices resemble fossils or melted ruins, while skull-like fragments recall prehistoric remains and sci-fi aliens. Her influences are as hybrid as the forms, spanning horror cinema, Giger’s Alien designs, and the haunted elongation of Giacometti’s figures. Yet Bhabha avoids simple homage; her art, like her figures, stands on its terms.
It helps that the setting—Brooklyn Bridge Park—amplifies the eerie ambiguity of the works. Surrounded by the water’s edge, the looming Statue of Liberty, and the city skyline, Bhabha’s figures feel like witnesses to civilization’s ceaseless rise and fall. The contrast between their eroded, seemingly timeless presence and the contemporary landmarks around them charges the scene with an almost existential weight. This feels like Bhabha’s genius: she manages to imbue bronze—a material so often relegated to commemorative tradition—with the unsettling energy of science fiction.
Among the four works, Nothing Falls stands out. Its tortured surface evokes a figure battered by untold histories; its elongated form is monumental and fragile. One imagines it as a survivor of a cataclysm—a monument to something unspeakable but deeply felt.
Bhabha has long mastered the art of ambiguity, crafting sculptures that feel alive with contradiction—ancient yet futuristic, grotesque yet elegant, figurative yet abstract. Before The End achieves what the best public art should be: it unsettles, provokes, and transforms the landscape around it. In Bhabha’s hands, the park becomes something more—a threshold to a parallel world where time collapses and humanity’s myths and fears materialize in bronze.
Her figures do not offer comfort. Instead, they ask us to look—at the earth, history, and ourselves—with new, unflinching eyes.
Huma Bhabha: Before The End is curated by Public Art Fund Executive & Artistic Director Nicholas Baume with support from Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.
Huma Bhabha: Before The End
The Brooklyn Bridge Park
Apr 30, 2024 – Mar 9, 2025
