Diana Al-Hadid -The Vanishing Point

Al-Hadid creates sprawling sculptures of seemingly impossible architecture. Born in Aleppo, Syria and raised in the US, Al-Hadid’s work crosses cultures and disciplines drawing inspiration from myriad sources including art history, ancient invention, science, science fiction and myth. Formal allusions span from a Gothic cathedral turned on its spires, to the maze of the Minotaur winding between the keys of an organ, to Brueghel’s Tower of Babel imploding upon itself, to the soaring water clock of 13th Century inventor Al-Jazari, to the theater of the Surrealist muse Gradiva, the preceding evidencing the increasingly present figure in Al-Hadid’s work.

While architectural reference persists within Al-Hadid’s new sculptures, it becomes more layered and obscured, acting as a foundational element that she intertwines with suggestions of the figure or landscape. In this new body of work the artist looks to the medium of painting, mining the Renaissance and Mannerism for their depiction of perspective. Al-Hadid investigates the two-dimensional picture plane within the three-dimensional space of sculpture. The result is an almost reverse trompe l’oeil effect in which she creates and exploits the inherent flatness of the canvas, propelling the sculpture into the realm of painting. The geometry of the vanishing point is readily discernible in the wall piece installed in the main gallery which derives its imagery from Raphael’s cartoon for the tapestry Christ’s Charge to Peter, 1515-1516. Al-Hadid further merges painting and sculpture by literally imbedding the work in the gallery walls; its white draped figures appearing ghost-like on a stonework grid that invites the viewer in and through the sculpture. Marianne Boesky Gallery