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Lot Essay
“I keep pursuing things that light up my brain – a story, a myth or a process.”
- Diana Al-Hadid (D. Al-Hadid, L. Russell, ‘Work in Progress: Diana Al-Hadid’, in Frieze Los Angeles, 2025).
Executed in 2012, Untitled exemplifies Diana Al-Hadid’s distinctive approach to drawing, in which the boundaries between image, surface and sculptural space are continually destabilised. Working in Conté, pastel, charcoal and acrylic upon translucent Mylar, Al-Hadid builds an intricate field of overlapping marks and fragmented forms that appear suspended upon the surface. The transparency of the support is integral to this effect: unlike traditional paper, Mylar allows her accumulated lines and passages of pigment to seemingly float, lending the composition a sense of material presence while simultaneously resisting solidity. In this respect, Al-Hadid’s works on Mylar are closely connected to her sculptural practice, translating her investigations into structure, accumulation and dissolution into two dimensions.
Born in Aleppo, Syria and raised in the United States, Al-Hadid has developed a practice that crosses cultures and disciplines, drawing upon a broad constellation of references encompassing art history, architecture, mythology, science, and science fiction. Her sources range from the soaring structures of Gothic cathedrals and the complex perspectives of Italian and Northern Renaissance painting to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel, the mythical labyrinth of the Minotaur and the ingenious mechanical constructions of the medieval engineer and inventor Ismail Al-Jazari (1136–1206). Al-Hadid is drawn to these diverse histories for the ways in which they negotiate structure and illusion and imagine forms that challenge conventional understandings of space and physical possibility. Rather than quoting them directly, she dismantles and reconfigures their visual and conceptual languages, using them as points of departure for her own investigations into perspective, materiality and spatial perception.
These concerns find particular resonance in the artist’s works on Mylar. Rather than functioning simply as preparatory studies for her sculptures, Al-Hadid’s drawings constitute a parallel investigation into many of the same formal elements. Layers of charcoal, Conté, pastel and acrylic coalesce into structures that seem at once architectural and unstable, emerging from dense passages before dissolving back into their surroundings. Conventional distinctions between foreground and background are unsettled as lines intersect, forms overlap, and fragments appear to hover within an indeterminate spatial field. The result echoes the precarious, gravity-defying structures of Al-Hadid’s three-dimensional work, in which architecture appears caught between construction and collapse.
The present work dates from a formative moment in Al-Hadid’s career. In 2011, she received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, having previously been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture in 2009. Around the period of the present work, Al-Hadid's practice received increasing institutional recognition through solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Her work is held in the collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
- Diana Al-Hadid (D. Al-Hadid, L. Russell, ‘Work in Progress: Diana Al-Hadid’, in Frieze Los Angeles, 2025).
Executed in 2012, Untitled exemplifies Diana Al-Hadid’s distinctive approach to drawing, in which the boundaries between image, surface and sculptural space are continually destabilised. Working in Conté, pastel, charcoal and acrylic upon translucent Mylar, Al-Hadid builds an intricate field of overlapping marks and fragmented forms that appear suspended upon the surface. The transparency of the support is integral to this effect: unlike traditional paper, Mylar allows her accumulated lines and passages of pigment to seemingly float, lending the composition a sense of material presence while simultaneously resisting solidity. In this respect, Al-Hadid’s works on Mylar are closely connected to her sculptural practice, translating her investigations into structure, accumulation and dissolution into two dimensions.
Born in Aleppo, Syria and raised in the United States, Al-Hadid has developed a practice that crosses cultures and disciplines, drawing upon a broad constellation of references encompassing art history, architecture, mythology, science, and science fiction. Her sources range from the soaring structures of Gothic cathedrals and the complex perspectives of Italian and Northern Renaissance painting to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel, the mythical labyrinth of the Minotaur and the ingenious mechanical constructions of the medieval engineer and inventor Ismail Al-Jazari (1136–1206). Al-Hadid is drawn to these diverse histories for the ways in which they negotiate structure and illusion and imagine forms that challenge conventional understandings of space and physical possibility. Rather than quoting them directly, she dismantles and reconfigures their visual and conceptual languages, using them as points of departure for her own investigations into perspective, materiality and spatial perception.
These concerns find particular resonance in the artist’s works on Mylar. Rather than functioning simply as preparatory studies for her sculptures, Al-Hadid’s drawings constitute a parallel investigation into many of the same formal elements. Layers of charcoal, Conté, pastel and acrylic coalesce into structures that seem at once architectural and unstable, emerging from dense passages before dissolving back into their surroundings. Conventional distinctions between foreground and background are unsettled as lines intersect, forms overlap, and fragments appear to hover within an indeterminate spatial field. The result echoes the precarious, gravity-defying structures of Al-Hadid’s three-dimensional work, in which architecture appears caught between construction and collapse.
The present work dates from a formative moment in Al-Hadid’s career. In 2011, she received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, having previously been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture in 2009. Around the period of the present work, Al-Hadid's practice received increasing institutional recognition through solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Her work is held in the collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.