Architectural pioneer and visionary Zaha Hadid has left a mark with her ground-breaking and innovative work. In addition to her breathtaking buildings Hadid was a gifted artist with the genre of drawing at the very heart of her practice.
An earlier exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London included many of her paintings, drawings and skechings – also from her rarely seen notebooks. These artistic endeavors are tracing her complex thoughts about architectural forms and their relationships.
Drawing and painting were fundamental to Zaha Hadid. Influenced by Malevich, Tatlin and Rodchenko, she used calligraphic drawings as the main method for visualising her architectural ideas. For Hadid, painting was a design tool, and abstraction an investigative structure for imagining architecture and its relationship to the world we live in.
These works on paper and canvas unravel an architecture that Hadid was determined to realise in built structures and is seen in the characteristic lightness and weightlessness of her buildings. Conceived as Hadid’s manifesto of a utopian world, the artworks show her all-encompassing visions of arranging space and interpreting realities.
Many of Hadid’s paintings pre-empt the potential of digital and virtual reality. Technology and innovation has always been central to the work of Zaha Hadid Architects: As Patrik Schumacher, Director, Zaha Hadid Architects said “It was Zaha Hadid who went first and furthest in exploring this way of innovating in architecture – without, as well as with, the support of advanced software”.