Diana Al-Hadid’s opus inhabits multiple media: large-scale sculptures, drawings, site-specific installations and painting all feature throughout the Syria-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s work.
Al-Hadid’s work is rooted in history: she often references art from centuries past, from which she borrows motifs that she rearranges, reinterprets and uses in her own compositions. It is a symbiotic fascination, one that lends Al-Hadid’s work a gravitas that works to elevate the pieces beyond their physical magnitude.
Simultaneously earthy and otherwordly, her gravity-defying life-sized sculptures challenge notions of space, time and humanity. They are in the space, though not of the space: Al Hadid consciously plays with voids—of materials and their arrangements, to tacitly interact with the surrounding space.
In Actor (2009), for instance, Al-Hadid employs an amalgam of materials (steel, wood, polystyrene, plaster, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, aluminum foil, silverleaf, paint) to create pinnacles that rise above cascading material bound by a mesh of metal rods.
It is such complexity of assemblage and seeming divergence of shapes that Al-Hadid uses to form shapes that are at once gentle yet stark, lifelike yet misshapen.
She allows us to trace the roots of an idea, but never the precise source.
More recently, she began expanding to media such as painting and drawing as an extension of her spatial constructions to create painting-sculpture blends that further highlight her multi-dimensional approach to creating.
Actor, 2009
Al-Hadid obtained her MFA in fine art in 2007 from Virginia Commonwealth University. She went on to exhibit around the world, including, in 2014, at Secession in Vienna, Austria and at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York.
Now, LA’s OH WOW gallery is hosting the second solo exhibition of Al Hadid’s work in Los Angeles (she first exhibited at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in 2010). Featuring old pieces as well as new work, the show will showcases recent expansions to Al Hadid’s palette and theme portfolio.
In Mortal Repose, 2011
Contort Yourself, the Trees, 2013
Play the Wolf Fifth, 2010
Spun of the Limits of My Lonely Waltz, 2006
Diana Al-Hadid runs from April 11 – May 16, 2015 at OH WOW at 937 N. La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. For more information, see here.