13 Sculptures by Diana Al-Hadid, a contemporary artist who creates sculptures, installations and drawings using various media

Diana Al-Hadid (born 1981) is a contemporary artist who creates sculptures, installations and drawings using various media. She was born, and lived in Aleppo, Syria, in 1981 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. More on Diana al-Hadid

Diana Al-Hadid

Nolli's Orders

combines fluid forms cast in foam and polymer gypsum and solid, rectilinear shapes made of plywood

Private collection

Diana Al-Hadid's practice has grown beyond a simple, single-handed production; yet, she still wields a paintbrush, drill, and blowtorch in her oversized Brooklyn studio.

Diana Al-Hadid

Built From Our Tallest Tales - 2008

Wood, metal, polystyrene, gypsum polymer, fibreglass, plastic, concrete and paint

365.8 x 254 x 203.2 cm

Private collection

Diana Al-Hadid evokes the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis, via the famous 1563 painting of this building as a utopian structure by Pieter Breughel the Elder.

Diana Al-Hadid

The Tower of Infinite Problems (detail) 2008

Polymer gypsum, steel, plaster, fibreglass, wood, polystyrene, cardboard, wax and paint

241.3 x 442 x 251.5 cm

Private collection

Her sculptures take ‘towers’ as their central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism. They are also – both in legends such as the Tower of Babel, and reality, such as the horrors of the World Trade Centre attacks – symbols of the problems of cultural difference and conflict. Al-Hadid’s Tower of Infinite Problems poses as a toppled skyscraper.

Diana Al-Hadid
Divided Line 2012
Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, gypsum board, plaster, wood, steel, paint
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Photo by Jason Wyche

Private collection

In 2003, al-Hadid received a BA in Art History and a BFA in sculpture from Kent State University in Ohio., In 2007, she received an MFA sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2005), Later, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine (2007)

Diana Al-Hadid
Suspended After Image
2012
Wood, steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, high density foam, plaster, paint
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Photo by Jason Wyche

Diana Al-Hadid

Self Melt 2008

Polymer gypsum, steel, polystyrene, cardboard, wax and paint

147.3 x 142.3 x 190.5 cm

Private collection

Al–Hadid’s geometric forms attempt to bridge mystical and scientific understandings of the world. As intensely patterned and detailed structures, her works draw from the traditions of Islamic art, where abstract motifs are used to encourage contemplation of God’s infinite wisdom.

Diana Al-Hadid

The Problem of Infinite Towers 2008

polymer gypsum, steel, plaster, wood, fiberglass, polystyrene, cardboard, wax, paint, 

126x157x133 in

Private collection

Diana Al-Hadid’s menacing, heavily worked, baroque structures take arrested hubris as their theme. In three large sculptures, powerful in impact and ambition alike, a wall installation and supporting drawings, once-soaring, elaborately engineered towers are rendered as ruins, whether slowly decaying in fragments or caught in a moment of catastrophic meltdown. Her evocations of destruction and decomposure generate rich surfaces as well as unsettling contemplations of the demise of powerful systems. 

Diana Al Hadid,

 Self-Met, 2008, 

polymer gypsum, steel, polystyrene, fiberglass, cardboard, wax, paint, 

58x56x75 in

Private collection

Diana Al-Hadid, 

Trace of a Fictional Third, 2011. 

Steel, polymer gypsum, wood, fiberglass and paint, 

120 x 240 x 156 inches. 

Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York © Diana Al-Hadid. Photo: Jason Wyche

True to form, her latest mixed-media sculpture is ambitious in scale and layered, whether in texture, reference or emotional content.  Earlier works explored richly suggestive imagery of collapsing towers and vulnerable machines, using lustrous formal means to suggest complex structures frozen in a moment of implosion.  The themes of time and motion arrested are followed through in Trace of a Fictional Third with its cascades of dripping forms and other signifiers of liquidity and flow; the piece also marks an early foray by Al-Hadid into figuration, though characteristically her draped forms, while convincingly, indeed almost voluptuously corporeal, have spectral connotations: ghosts within the machine, a haunted spectacle. - See more

Diana Al Hadid,

Actor, 2009, 

steel, wood, polystyrene, plaster, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, aluminium foil, silverleaf, paint

84x44x90 in

Private collection

Diana Al-Hadid

Water Thief, 2010. 

Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel

Private collection

The piece was inspired by a 13th-century Syrian water clock (Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, and now lives in Brooklyn), and more generally by a spirit of invention and architectural aspiration rooted in the past. “Water Thief” lacks the concentrated potency of Al-Hadid’s more discrete works, but its diffuse chaos has its own curious beauty. More

Diana Al-Hadid

Suspended After Image, 2012

Wood, steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, high density foam, plaster, paint

126 x 282 x 204 inches  320 x 716.3 x 518.2 cm

Commissioned by the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Diana Al-Hadid

Cenotaph for Two, 2011

Mixed media

132 x 90 x 90 inches  335.3 x 228.6 x 228.6 cm

Private collection

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints and 365 Days, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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