On Friday, May 24, 2019, “Diana Al-Hadid: Sublimations” will go on view in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery at Nashville’s Frist Art Museum and outdoors at Cheekwood through September 2, 2019. Featured will be sculptures and wall reliefs by this Syrian-American artist, who was born in 1981 in Aleppo, Syria and at five years old emigrated with her family to the US and grew up in Cleveland and Canton, Ohio. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Many of the artist’s sculptures appear suspended in a state of construction or collapse. “Al-Hadid’s works signify history as a pendulum between the disorder and the recuperative powers of creativity,” says Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala. “They contain allusions ranging from archaeological excavations and sacred frescoes, mosaics, or tapestries to female bodies that often appear as if they are melting or dissolving.”
Some of the works, being for the Frist, Gradiva and Synonym and at Cheekwood, The Grotto and Citadel for this exhibition, appeared in her 2018 “Delirious Matter” show in New York City’s Madison Square Park.
These sculptures deal with feminine images taken from art history, myth, literature and fictional female characters. At the Cheekwood, the “Citadel” takes Hans Memling’s “Allegory of Chastity” (ca. 1475), showing a woman enthroned or imprisoned within a mountain and guarded by fierce lions as a point of departure. “The image evokes the Christian patriarchal insistence on womanly virtue and ways of keeping women away from worldly passions,” writes Scala.
Other works show the body in decay or disintegration. At the Frist, “Head in the Clouds” is a skeletal wraith, haloed like a saint and winged like an angel, who holds in her extended hand a model of Al-Hadid’s childhood home. “While there are precedents of saints holding churches out as offerings to Christ, this recasts the tradition, asking what and where is home and what must be sacrificed in exchange for entering the larger world, questions more acute, perhaps, for the immigrant than the native born,” says curator Scala.
For more information on these concurrent exhibitions, see: www.fristartmuseum.org and www.cheekwood.org or call Buddy Kite at 615.744.3351.
About
Diana Al-Hadid received a BFA in sculpture and a BA in art history from Kent State University (2003) and an MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2005). Her work has been featured across Asia, Europe, and the United States, including exhibitions in Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York; San Jose Museum of Art, California; The NYUAD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Musèe Granet, France; Federica Schiavo Gallery, Italy; Galerie Isa, India, and Toshodaiji Temple, Japan.
She is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, and has been awarded grants by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 2009; was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow in 2009; and, awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors in 2011 among other awards. She was also a Jameel Sculpture Commission Finalist at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, last year. More on Diana at: http://www.dianaalhadid.com