AN ARTIST TO WATCH - SYRIAN SCULPTOR DIANA ALHADID

As a contemporary artist living and working in New York, Diana Al-Hadid, 27-year-old Sculptor from Syria, has achieved the kind of success one might expect from someone twice her age. Constructing large architectural sculptures from media such as polystyrene, plaster, fibreglass, wood and wax, Al-Hadid has already won numerous awards and residencies for her work, from the Sculpture Space in 2005 to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007, and was most recently announced a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Sculpture.

What is unusual about Al-Hadid’s work is the way her monumental yet sturdy sculptures have a real sense of fragility.

Al Hadid’s large-scale sculpture, ‘Record of a Mortal Universe,’ displayed at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in 2007, is a sculpture of a grand staircase which leads to a decomposing Greek temple. Exploring the idea of gravitational collapse the sculpture is based upon the event of a hero’s collapse through which Al Hadid incorporates religion, architecture and physics. In her rendering the hero and the universe become the same force and the universe becomes mortal, having a body with a measurable beginning and end.

Her first major solo show, “Reverse Collider,” took place in New York and was inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel, an enormous tower built at the city of Babel after the great biblical flood and the architecture of the Labyrinths.  She references these historic sites as prime examples of a hypoethetical archetypal architecture that is the essence of sculptural space.  The show was reviewed in numerous publications, and she was listed as an “Artist to Watch in 2009” in ArtNews magazine. 

Closer to home, Al-Hadid, has enjoyed recent success in the Middle East. As one of 50 participating artists at the Sharjah Biennial 9 last month, where she showcased her work ‘Spells on our youth,’ Al-Hadid’s sculptures continue to impress those who follow her work.