Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso

February 8 – March 19, 2014
Opening Reception: February 8, 6 to 8 pm

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present “Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso,” two sculptors separated by more than a century, yet allied in their innovative questioning of traditional practice and exploration of two-dimensional concepts in a three-dimensional sphere.

Both Rosso’s and Al-Hadid’s work has the seeming appearance of accident and happenstance, but the reality is derived from repetition and a meticulous awareness of material and perception. Frequently revisiting the same subject, Rosso’s preoccupation with light and the capturing of ephemeral phenomena conceptually adheres him more directly with impressionist painters, rather than his contemporary sculptors. By 1883 Rosso created images that existed “on the border between sculpture and painting. The figures appear to be fused with their surroundings as a result of the dissolution of contours and the abolition of empty spaces, and, to be correctly understood, it is necessary to view them from a single angle. [Rosso] attempts to bring sculpture closer to painting and to achieve formal ‘dematerialization’ by means of light….”1

It was during Diana Al-Hadid’s 2011 exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas that Al-Hadid had her first live encounter with the work of the Italian master. Her fascination was observed by Nasher curator Jed Morse who noted “[p]erhaps it is not surprising that the modern artist who most interests Al-Hadid is Medardo Rosso….His figures like Al-Hadid’s, appear to be emerging from and receding into the material from which they are made. Rosso’s sculptures, like Al-Hadid’s, evince a powerful, poetic longing for a moment now passed.”2 Al-Hadid’s sculptures appear caught in a moment of transition in which the object itself appears as a disintegrating artifact from a lost city or a figure collapsing upon herself. Mining her subject matter from Italian and Northern Renaissance painting, mythology and architecture, Al-Hadid explores pictorial devises usually confined to the two-dimensional plane. Like Rosso, who conceived of his sculpture from a single frontal point of view, Al-Hadid is also conscious of the viewer’s perspective, mindful of the whole space yet directing the interaction. In Head in the Clouds, Al-Hadid presents a soaring figure whose head extends into the gallery’s skylight. The viewer’s eye is drawn both upward and around the figure to finally rest on outstretched arms cradling a building, a nod to the artist’s interest in Renaissance tropes and architecture.

Rosso’s innovation also extended to his exploration of techniques and materials expanding the concept of traditional sculpture. By arresting the lost-wax method of bronze casting mid-process, Rosso elevated the resultant wax and plaster works to formal presentations. These “softer” materials also functioned to further elaborate and illustrate the sensations of immediacy and dynamism. Al-Hadid similarly experiments with wax and bronze, manipulating and pushing the material to correspondingly coax transmutable properties, most evident in the artist’s cracked mirror works such as Fool’s Gold. The mirrors of the series originate in stone, but are then shattered to seemingly leak their reflective qualities.

1 Marica, Magni, “Medardo Rosso,” in Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press (2009).

2 Morse, Jed, “Sightings: Diana Al-Hadid,” Nasher Sculpture Center, p. 8 (2011).