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18 November 2004 – 16 January 2005
To coincide with the exhibition Circling the Square: Avant-garde Porcelain from Revolutionary Russia in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, the Gilbert Collection is staging an unprecedented exhibition of ‘paintings’ by the celebrated architect Zaha Hadid. Since her student days Zaha Hadid has been inspired by the revolutionary ideas of the Russian avant-garde, in particular the works of Tatlin and the Suprematist artist Malevich, whose designs for ceramics feature in the Hermitage Rooms exhibition.
Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad in 1950 and trained at the Architectural Association in London, burst on to the architectural scene in the early 1980s with a series of spectacular designs for ambitious projects. Her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture. Best known for her seminal built works, such as the Vitra Fire Station, Land Formation-One, Bergisel Ski-Jump, Strasbourg Tram Station and Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, her central concerns involve a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching and research. In 2004 Zaha Hadid was Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
This exhibition brings together nine of her ‘paintings’. Zaha Hadid sees these large coloured canvases as a vital part of the design process rather than as independent works of art. They are tools, developed in parallel with drawings and models, and they play a specific role in monitoring the evolution of each design. Even though they have become powerful objects in their own right, their importance lies in their contribution to Hadid’s overall architectural ambition: to develop a new language for architecture in general, as well as articulating a specific aesthetic for each project. Hadid’s ‘paintings’ are open fields where formal structures take shape through a process of gradual accumulation, fields that were worked and reworked for many weeks and even months as the project progressed. No single flash of inner imagination can compete with such a drawn-out process. The complexity, density and organic intricacy of the spatial textures are the result of this ‘long exposure’. A distinctive feature of these ‘paintings’ is the layering, in parallel with a transparent rendering of elements that reveals the depth of the composition. This superimposition of transparent layers anticipates the spatial interpenetration of geometric figures creating more complex organisations.
Zaha Hadid Architects is currently working on a variety of projects including:
The practice has recently completed the “Central Plant Building” for BMW in Leipzig, Germany, and is currently on site with The National Centre of Contemporary Arts “MAXXI” in Rome, Italy; the Ordrupgaard Museum extension in Copenhagen, Denmark; the “Phaeno Science Centre” in Wolfsburg, Germany; a visitor’s centre and cellar tasting room for the winery Lopez De Heredia Vina Tondonia; a major bridge structure in Abu Dhabi; a housing project “Spittelau Viaducts” in Vienna, Austria and the “One North” Master Plan in Singapore. |
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