Zaha Hadid

Leila Heller Gallery New York is pleased to present “Zaha Hadid,” an exhibition featuring the oeuvre of the late internationally renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid. On view will be works spanning from a breadth of Hadid’s designs including pieces from the 2015 Liquid Glacial Collection of furniture. 

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, Leila Heller Gallery presents various bodies of Hadid’s 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. Made from sustainably-sourced American walnut and hand-finished to a seamless surface, the Volu table (2015), is conceived as a dinning pavilion with curved components and is shaped further by typological, functional and ergonomic considerations. Hadid’s ethic of deep environmental and physical inter-connectedness is exemplified in the Visio vases (2014), whose intricate pleats seek to portray the complexity of liquid form.

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.