San José Museum of Art

See what you think.

Diana Al-Hadid: Liquid City

  • A large sculpture fills a gallery—like a cityscape with columns and boxes supporting the structure's height. It is covered in an unidentifiable white material is delicate and strong. It drips over the columns and boxes, appearing as roofs, treetops, clouds, and lounging oversized people.

    Diana Al-Hadid
    Nolli's Orders, 2012
    Steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam, plaster, aluminum foil, and pigment
    156 × 264 × 228 inches
    Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

  • Inside a gallery, a large, multi-layer sculpture appears as an ancient cityscape built into mountains. An unidentifiable white-ish material appears on top of the various layers and structures, acting almost like stretching people, treetops, ceilings, and clouds.

    Diana Al-Hadid
    Nolli's Orders, 2012
    Steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam, plaster, aluminum foil, and pigment
    156 × 264 × 228 inches
    Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

  • A closeup detail of a large sculpture. Focused on a single figure, laying on its back, made of indeterminate white-ish rusty materials. The figure is surrounded by delicate and strong drippings of this material that also have various brown shades mixed in.

    Diana Al-Hadid
    Nolli's Orders (detail), 2012
    Photo by Pasag Photography

  • A large canvas filled with delicate and heavy drips. The colors are mostly white with muted pinks, yellows, greens, and blues. At first, it looks like chaotic drips, but looking further, cathedral-like archways appear, with columns in the foreground and background.

    Diana Al-Hadid
    Mob Mentality, 2014
    Polymer gypsum,  berglass, steel, plaster, gold leaf, and pigment
    Private collection, New York
    Photo courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.

  • A square black and white drawing of a map, with names that imply it is a map of another country's city. The hand-sketched map details piazzas, buildings, streets and major thoroughfares.

    Giambattista Nolli
    Nuova pianta di Roma (detail), 1748

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    Diana Al-Hadid is fascinated by boundaries, where something begins and ends. How do we define a space—be it architectural, sculptural, or experiential? Drawing on a panoply of art-historical and scientific references, she explores the space between two-dimensional mark-making and three-dimensional sculpture, the imagined and the real, interior and exterior, belonging and alienation, the ruin and the yet-to-be-completed.

    Al-Hadid’s monumental sculpture Nolli’s Orders (2012) will anchor SJMA’s central skylight gallery like a Bernini fountain in a Roman piazza. Throughout history, cities have been shaped by such sources of water. The title of Al-Hadid’s room-sized sculpture refers to Giambattista Nolli’s landmark 1748 map of Rome, which was the first map of its kind to show the public spaces of the city. Publically accessible buildings are shown as transparent; private structures are rendered as solid. With a distinctly contemporary sense of irresolution and uncertainty, Al-Hadid delves into the same interactions in Nolli’s Orders: void and solid, transparent and opaque, public and private, figure and ground.

    Diana Al-Hadid: Liquid City unpacks the artist’s creative process by bringing together related works and primary source materials. For example, a reprinted folio of Nolli’s map and works on paper by old masters offer points of entry into the interwoven intricacies of Al-Hadid’s thinking. Avoiding literal translation, Al- Hadid radically takes visual elements from her source materials out of context by reassembling and then fusing them into new narratives. This interest in displacement stems in part from the artist’s own immigrant experience (she was born in Aleppo, Syria, and grew up in Ohio). However, the themes of uncertainty and the fragility of man-made structures—both physical and social—pervade facets of contemporary life across the globe.

    Sponsored by the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Tad and Jackson Freese and Wanda Kownacki.

    Press

    Notable Museum Openings This Spring and Summer, The New York Times
    March 15, 2017

    Huge sculpture stands sentinel in ‘Liquid City,’ San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate)
    June 26, 2017

    Need to Get Out of the City? Here Are 5 Art-Themed Day Trips for Summer’s Dog Days, artnet news
    August 9, 2017

    Exhibition Brochure