Leila Heller Gallery Dubai is hosting the first-ever exhibition in the region of renowned Iraqi-British architect and designer Zaha Hadid’s product designs. The show features designs spanning from the early 1980s, when Hadid emerged on the international stage, up to her most recent creations.
Manon Janssens, head of exhibitions and archive at Zaha Hadid Architects Ltd, says, “Most people know only about Hadid’s architectural projects; and the retrospectives we organise usually include both architecture and product design. But this show is dedicated to her design pieces. The large space at Leila Heller Gallery Dubai offered us the luxury of showing her whole design range, from large furniture pieces to smaller objects such as vases, chess sets, platters, lamps and jewellery. These include important pieces designed in collaboration with other companies as well as designs created for our own recently launched brand ‘Zaha Hadid Design’.
“We are presenting limited edition pieces as well as new colours in her classic furniture designs that are being exhibited for the first time. You can see that for Hadid, there is no separation between her designs for architecture and for other pieces, and she sees it as a continuous flow of ideas. For example, the ‘Vortex’ ring exhibited here is based on her design for the ‘Vortex’ chandelier. We have also included prototypes for a car and a speed boat that she designed for a client, to show that if the project interests her, there is no limit on what she will design.”
Hadid was born in Iraq in 1950. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, and architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She established her own practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1979, and caught the world’s attention with trailblazing projects such as The Peak in Hong Kong, the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales.
Over the last three decades she has won many awards and accolades. In 2004, she became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize; and this year she became the first woman recipient of the Royal Gold Medal awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects. She has been honoured with the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France, the Praemium Imperiale by Japan and in 2012 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She has also contributed as a researcher and educator in the development of a new way of thinking in her field. She has taught at the Architectural Association school in London, and been a guest professor at universities around the world, including Columbia, Harvard, Yale and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In her built designs, Hadid explores the interface between architecture, urbanism, landscape and geology through innovative ideas that integrate natural topography and human-made systems. She is known for the organic forms and fluid curves and folds in her designs, as well as her visionary spatial concepts and innovative experiments with materials and construction processes. Her unique approach to design can be seen in projects such as the London Olympic Aquatics Stadium, the Guangzhou Opera House, the MAXXI Museum in Rome and the Shaikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi.
The signature elements of her large-scale building projects and grand architecture are translated into lyrical condensations in the interior, domestic or personal space in her product designs. More than 30 bodies of Hadid’s design work are showcased in this exhibition, tracing the transition from her early “semi-tectonic” style to her “semi-liquid” phase after the 1990s. The angular “Seoul” Desk, from 2008, made from high gloss fibreglass is an example of the way she transposes the vertical and horizontal in her work. The pleated, organic forms of the marble vases in the 2015 “Tau” vase collection seek to portray the complexity of natural growth systems, showcasing the deep connection between the physical and environmental that is a hallmark of her designs.
Hadid plays with myriad materials and processes to bring her ideas to life. The Z-chair she designed in 2003 is made from polished stainless steel, and the 2013 “Kuki” chair is in bronze. She used lacquered fibreglass with fabric upholstery to create a feeling of solidity in her fluid design for the “Zephyr” sofa, created in 2014 for her label, Zaha Hadid Design. Her “Luna” collection of tables, also from 2014, is made from marble with her signature curves carved in the centre. On the other hand, she worked with clear acrylic to achieve the look of melting ice in her recent “Liquid Glacial” furniture collection.
“The elegant ‘Luna’ table, designed for the Italian marble company CITCO, is an important design where Hadid has used a very classical material to create something so contemporary; and in the ‘Liquid Glacial’ collection that she made for David Gill Galleries, the spectacular shadows created on the floor by the transparent tables and chairs add to the impact of the design,” Janssens says.
Hadid collaborated with SLAMP to create her “Aria” and “Avia” suspension lamp collections, which combine her fluid lines with state-of-the-art lighting technologies. These lamps, used to great effect in her iconic architectural projects such as the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul and the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku, are also available at the exhibition. Her ongoing exploration of scale and spatial relations is also manifested in her jewellery collections, where the curving forms, multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry of her architecture is blended with cellular structures from nature.
Jyoti Kalsi is an arts-enthusiast based in Dubai.
The exhibition “Zaha Hadid” will run at Leila Heller Gallery Dubai in Alserkal Avenue until February 29.
Poetic landscapes
Leila Heller Gallery Dubai is also hosting an exhibition of paintings by the late Iranian artist Sohrab Sepehri, titled “Sohrab Sepehri: Poetic Landscapes”. The well-known modernist painter and poet studied lithography in Paris, Japanese calligraphy in Tokyo and Buddhism in India; and his layered, abstract landscapes are influenced by his travels and encounters with various cultures. Since his death in 1980, his paintings have rarely been exhibited in public. This exhibition in Dubai marks the first in-depth exploration of the artist’s practice after a retrospective at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.
At a time when Iranian society was experiencing rapid modernisation and urbanisation, Sepehri’s paintings were imbued with a nostalgic return to a more tranquil naturalism. He took inspiration from the harmony, balance and tranquillity he found in nature to create poetic paintings that invite viewers to contemplate the relationship between the spiritual and natural world. In the 1960s, he began painting stark close-ups of tree trunks that combined Western modernism and Japanese minimalism into a Persian aesthetics. In these iconic paintings the tree trunks appear as symbols of strength, permanence and absolute truth in an ephemeral world full of uncertainties. The artist’s focus on just a section of the trunks evokes the mystery of a unified cosmos and the limits of human perception.
–Jyoti Kalsi
“Sohrab Sepehri: Poetic Landscapes” will run at Leila Heller Gallery Dubai in Alserkal Avenue until February 29.
