In the sculptural world of Bruno Catalano, absence is presence, and voids carry more meaning than what is materially there. In ZHUBERMAN (2025), Catalano advances his signature style—where the human figure appears partially missing, fragmented yet powerfully intact—into a new philosophical dimension. Cast in bronze and standing at 60 centimeters tall, this newest work becomes not just a representation of a man in motion, but a profound reflection on what is lost, carried, and forgotten in the act of journeying.
The Catalano Canon: A Brief Context
Bruno Catalano, born in Morocco and long based in France, has spent over two decades refining a visual language uniquely his own. His “Voyageurs” series—begun in the late 1990s—presented travelers, often missing entire sections of their torsos or limbs, suspended in mid-walk, clutching suitcases or bags. These intentional absences invite interpretations ranging from the psychological to the political, positioning Catalano’s work in the liminal zone between figuration and abstraction, reality and metaphor.
With ZHUBERMAN, created in 2025, Catalano does not stray from this idiom but rather sharpens it. The absence here feels more precise, more surgically composed, more laden with an emotional syntax that speaks to our age of fragmented identities and displaced narratives. The name itself—ZHUBERMAN—suggests a hybrid being, perhaps Eastern European or Central Asian in tone, a constructed identity that feels both invented and real, an echo of millions who have traversed continents, bearing invisible luggage.
Physical Description: The Anatomy of Disappearance
Standing 60 centimeters high, ZHUBERMAN is cast in patinated bronze, with a rich, earthen hue that gives the impression of clay aged under desert suns or city grime. The figure appears mid-stride—Catalano’s trademark gesture—weight balanced on one foot, the other hovering in kinetic promise. From the side, the man’s body seems whole. But turn slightly, and the illusion unravels.
A vast portion of his torso is missing, from just below the chest to above the knees, carved away as though by time, wind, or memory. There is no gore in this absence—no jagged edges or wounds. The cuts are clean. They resemble architectural subtractions, like negative space in a sculpture garden or the absent organs in ancient reliquaries. The void becomes more present than the bronze that remains.
In his left hand, ZHUBERMAN clutches a tattered duffel bag, as if the weight of his memories remains anchored there. The right arm reaches forward slightly, index finger almost raised—a subtle gesture that could suggest direction, warning, or even lament. His face is weathered and stylized, with deep-set eyes and a furrowed brow that suggests fatigue, defiance, or perhaps the resigned patience of those who perpetually traverse.
The patina of the bronze varies, darkening in the recesses of the figure’s neck and hands, and glowing faintly where light hits the shoulders or cheekbones. This interplay of light and shadow creates a rhythm of visibility and concealment—a duality that resonates deeply with the thematic content of the work.
Thematic Depth: Exile, Identity, and Fragmentation
Catalano has often explained that his fragmented figures represent the parts of ourselves left behind when we migrate—whether across borders or through emotional thresholds. ZHUBERMAN intensifies this metaphor. It is not just a migrant; it is migration embodied. Not just a traveler, but the very concept of travel hollowed and re-formed.
Exile Without Wound
There is something curiously non-violent about the void in ZHUBERMAN. The subtraction of form does not evoke trauma in the usual sense—it does not scream. It whispers. The sculpture becomes a metaphor for a quieter kind of disappearance, the type that accumulates over time: the loss of language fluency, the forgetting of a childhood song, the slow erasure of family names from memory. Here, absence is not catastrophic but inevitable. It is what happens when you must adapt, conform, or retranslate your own biography.
Identity in Suspension
What remains of ZHUBERMAN is just as significant as what’s missing. The feet remain rooted. The face remains expressive. There is a spine, though broken. These retained elements ground the piece in humanity, even as the missing portions call that humanity into question. What is a man, if his center is gone? Who are we, when we are caught between origin and destination?
This suspension—this refusal to resolve—is the crux of Catalano’s brilliance. ZHUBERMAN is never finished, never whole. He is always on the way. And so too are we.
2025 and the Age of Global Transience
There’s something hauntingly contemporary about ZHUBERMAN. Though Catalano’s visual language hasn’t changed drastically over the decades, its meaning becomes more urgent with time. In 2025, the year of this sculpture’s creation, the world finds itself in a chronic state of flux. Wars in Europe and the Middle East displace millions. Climate refugees redefine geopolitical borders. AI-driven labor migration and digital nomadism blur the lines between belonging and otherness.
In this context, ZHUBERMAN becomes not a symbol of one man’s journey, but of everyone’s fractured path. The figure becomes transnational, transhistorical, transhuman. A father escaping war. A tech worker relocating from San Francisco to Seoul. A child born in a refugee camp, caught between documentation and erasure.
ZHUBERMAN asks the question: how much can you lose and still remain yourself?
Literary Echoes: Absence as Form
From a literary perspective, ZHUBERMAN echoes the aesthetic tradition of fragmentation as narrative. Think of the modernist ruptures in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, the elliptical prose of Samuel Beckett, or the memory-shattered voices in W.G. Sebald. These are texts populated by people disassembled by history, trauma, and displacement. Catalano’s sculpture shares their grammar. His bronze voids are visual ellipses, his polished surfaces a kind of sculptural stream-of-consciousness.
If ZHUBERMAN were a poem, it might read:
A man walks
carrying a bag of silence.
He is missing
the parts he used to laugh with.
Or if it were prose:
He arrived in the city with a name he no longer used. Inside his bag were fragments: a watch with no hands, a photo with the eyes scratched out, a key that no longer opened any door.
In this way, ZHUBERMAN is not only sculpture, but narrative material. It invites the viewer to read into it, around it, and through it.
Critical Reception and Future Placement
Though newly cast in 2025, ZHUBERMAN has already drawn significant interest from art institutions and collectors alike. Private galleries across Paris, Dubai, and New York have signaled interest, while curators have noted its power as a centerpiece for any collection grappling with themes of migration, memory, or postmodern identity.
What sets this piece apart from earlier works by Catalano is its scale and intimacy. At 60 cm, it is not monumental like some of his public commissions. It is a sculpture to be lived with. To be approached at eye level. To sit beside. To reckon with in private.
In this way, ZHUBERMAN becomes an altar of absence—not a monument to loss, but a tool for contemplation. It does not overwhelm you with grandeur, but rather invites you inward, into your own inventory of missing things.
ZHUBERMAN is not broken. He is deliberately incomplete. This distinction matters.
In an era saturated with the pursuit of seamless perfection—digitally rendered lives, algorithmically smoothed identities—Catalano’s sculpture reminds us that to be human is to be incomplete by nature. The missing parts do not diminish the figure; they define it. ZHUBERMAN is powerful not despite his absences, but because of them.
Bruno Catalano, through the medium of bronze, offers a paradox: a sculpture with less matter and more meaning. A figure that walks forward while leaving parts of himself behind. And in doing so, ZHUBERMAN becomes more than sculpture. He becomes a mirror—fragmented, reflective, and profoundly whole.
