The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to announce its third exhibition with the architect Zaha Hadid to coincide with Gallery Weekend in Berlin. The focus of the presentation is on eight Silver Paintings, three Dot Paintings, and the large furniture-sculpture Iceberg and Gyre.
More information after the break.
Zaha Hadid became internationally known in the early 1980s for a series of spectacular designs, drawings, and paintings. These early studies were unusual in that they were not simply studies associated with a task but also permitted an open interpretation of the project from various perspectives. Architecture always exists in the area of tension between 2-D and 3-D, between the translation of drawing into building. Nevertheless, in architecture it is precisely the drawing, the 2-D works, that achieved true innovations, which is why the Silver Paintings and the Dot Paintings are particularly important in this exhibition “Drawing accelerates the evolution of architecture,” as Patrik Schumacher, Senior Office Partner at ZHA Architects, explains.
Zaha Hadid’s Silver Paintings and Dot Paintings express notions of space that are otherwise familiar only from abstract formulas or can only be experienced as tectonic forms. Images are important to the studio’s work because their modulations of colour, gradients of dark to light or pointillist techniques are design means that cause objects to disappear against their background, showing different options on the long path to the built reality. The graphic forms of the Silver Paintings and Dot-Paintings are translated step by step into tectonic structures. Hadid’s images are representational without being naturalistic, because they do not show physical realities but rather architectural possibilities: Detlef Mertins explains in the catalogue to Hadid’s 2006 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum: “Hadid’s paintings bring mathematical and geological geometries into greater alignment.”
The Iceberg furniture piece, designed for Sawaya & Moroni, is part of a line of formal research that explores the idea of liquid territories. The outstanding and apparent features of this bench are two icicles – like extensions. One is darting into horizontality whereas the other points vertical. Although these two shapes are opposing and contrasting each other there is mediation between them through a diagonal fold that “morphs” one form into the other. The Gyre chair, from the 2006 Seamless Collection by Zaha Hadid for Established & Sons, is an obvious evolution of the architectural language explored: soft meets sharp, convex and concave, and a sculptural sensibility that impactness on our self-conception. The rhythm of folds, niches, recesses and protrusions follows a coherent formal logic. With the formal dynamic of a fluid mass, Hadid emphasizes the continuous nature of the design and the smooth evolution between otherwise disparate elements.
Zaha Hadid has consistently extended the limits of architecture and the designed space. Her experimentation with new spatial concepts has attracted worldwide attention and her seminal built works include the MAXXI: National Museum of 21st century Arts in Rome and the London Aquatics centre for the 2012 Olympic Games.
