Zaha Hadid

Leila Heller Gallery Dubai presents “Zaha Hadid”, a mid-career exhibition of the oeuvre of internationally renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid. Spanning the breath of Hadid’s product designs from the early 80s – on the cusp of the architect’s emergence onto the global stage – to the 2015 Liquid Glacial Collection furniture range.
From the MAXXI Museum in Rome to the London Olympic Aquatics Stadium, from the Guangzhou Opera House to the Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi, over the last 30 years Hadid has engaged with architecture as a form of landscape painting, transforming the hard-geometry of 20th century vertical aspirations into a site specific horizontal reflection of multi-perspectival design, heralding a new era along the way. For this exhibition, the hallmarks of these large scale building projects and grand architecture reveal themselves in the architect’s use of a new spatial paradigm at all scales, and in a myriad of materials resulting in a multitude of forms of domestic reverie.
On the occasion of this exhibition Hadid presents over 30 bodies of design work, exemplifying her transition after the 1990s from an ‘early semi-tectonic’ into her ‘later semi-liquid’ phase. The architect’s transposition of the vertical and horizontal can be seen in the angular Seoul Desk (2008), composed in high gloss fiberglass. Hadid’s ethic of deep environmental and physical inter- connectedness is exemplified in the Tau vases (2015), whose intricate pleats seek to portray the formal complexity of natural growth systems. As the body of architecture transposes itself onto the architecture of the body in Hadid’s continuous exploration of scale and spatial relations, the intimate constructions of her jewellery collections present multi-faceted lattice pieces, portraying intricate yet extremely strong cellular structures within nature.
Hadid’s work in design presents a 21st century evolution towards iconic folds and organic forms, as well as an exploration of scale, innovation, and materiality: from the delicately tactile to the high-gloss industrial. These signature elements in the evolution of a gesture translate into lyrical condensations in the interior, domestic, or personal space.