Head in the Clouds
The sculptural work of Diana Al-Hadid often refers to boundaries as a way to challenge preconceived notions of how one defines and experiences space. Drawing from an array of art-historical and scientific references, Al-Hadid’s work treads carefully between the imagined and the real, to address the tension between interior and exterior, belonging and alienation, the ruin and the yet-to-be-completed.
The centerpiece of Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter at the Bronx Museum will be the monumental sculpture Nolli’s Orders (2012), which references Giambattista Nolli’s landmark 1748 map of Rome, the first of its kind to show the public spaces of the city. In it, publically accessible buildings are shown as transparent; private structures are rendered as solid. In Nolli’s Orders, Al-Hadid used the same lexicon of voids and solids, transparency and opaqueness, to convey public and private spaces, figure and ground.
Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter will be shown concurrently with a special commission by the Madison Square Park Conservancy of new sculptural works by Al-Hadid, and it will feature additional works and primary source materials, including a reprinted folio of Nolli’s map and works on paper by old masters from the Metropolitan Museum collection.
Syrian-born and Brooklyn-based artist Diana Al-Hadid (b. 1981) has had solo exhibitions at the Akron Museum of Art, Akron, OH (2013); the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2013); and at Secession, Vienna, Austria (2014). Works from her exhibition at Secession traveled to the NYU Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi in March 2016. She also had solo exhibitions at the Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University (2016), and the San Jose Museum of Art (2017). Al-Hadid’s work is included in public collections such as The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter has been organized in collaboration with San José Museum of Art curator Lauren Schell Dickens.
Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter is made possible by lead sponsor National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from Anonymous, Debbie Landau, Lisa Marie Marks, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, and the Collector’s Circle, the Bronx Museum’s upper level patrons group.
