New York | North America
Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art announced recently that Diana Al-Hadid’s Delirious Matter would be on view this year from 7 May to 3 September 2018. Delirious Matter will be Al-Hadid’s first major public art exhibition and will feature a total of six sculptures to be installed across Madison Square Park’s northern reflecting pool, the central Oval Lawn, as well as the peripheral lawns.
Born in Aleppo Syria, Diana Diana Al-Hadid based in Brooklyn, where she currently lives and works. Al-Hadid has had a number of solo exhibitions including shows at the Akron Museum of Art, Akron (2013), Secession, Vienna, Austria (2014), and the San Jose Museum of Art (2017). Her work has also been integrated into public collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Toledo Museum of Art, and so many other public collections across various American states.
Al-Hadid is best known for creating her sculptures using traditional and contemporary materials and processes in unique and interesting ways. As such, her work is characterized by an expertly balanced combination of abstraction, figuration, and architecture.
This new show at the Madison Square Garden will be the artists first major outdoor project. It will debut in tandem with another presentation at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, where Al-Hadid’s monumental sculpture titled Nolli’s Orders will be presented.
Respected and well known for her one-of-a-kind sculptures that always appear to be eroding yet growing at the same time, Ms. Al-Hadid’s show will feature two 14 foot walls that will be framed by hedgerows. The fourteen-foot walls will create an outdoor room that will accommodate incoming visitors.
The first sectioned wall will consist of a piece titled Synonym. Synonym will feature figures of three reclining women each sitting on a platform to be displayed on the adjoining lawns. The presentation at the park’s reflecting pool will be reminiscent of Hans Memling’s painting “Allegory of Chastity” (circa 1475) and will include a sculptural bust of a female perched on top of a mountain.
Al-Hadid paints her figures and sculptures using a signature technique of hers that she describes as a ‘mix of fresco and tapestry’. The end result will be elegant figures that dissolve into dripping abstracted landscapes, a look which pivots between ruin and regeneration. This particular effect is achieved by mixing wet tinted polymer gypsum. This will be Madison Square Art’s thirty-sixth exhibition.