Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins, an exhibition of panels, works on paper, and works on mylar by Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Diana Al-Hadid. This show marks Al-Hadid’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view November 15, 2024, through January 9, 2025. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Friday, November 15 from 4:00 to 7:00pm. 

Wild Margins exhibits Diana Al-Hadid's first career exploration of works produced and inspired by techniques of hand-papermaking learned during her year-long residency at Dieu Donné. As a Lab Grant Resident, an invitation-only residency that allows mid-career and established artists to explore the art of papermaking, Al-Hadid worked with expert paper makers to master new processes such as pulp painting, blowout, and stenciling. Calling the paper process “one of the most revolutionary pieces of her practice recently,” Al-Hadid approaches making these paper pulp works in a similar fashion to her larger mixed media works, blending layered materials and substrate until completely cohered.

Al-Hadid's experimentation with paper coincided with the construction of her upstate New York studio leading to a body of work steeped in the inspirations of nature and its boundaries. Al-Hadid is known to weave threads between historical, architectural, cosmological, and folkloric themes, probing the disjunctive and investigating allegories. As a truly immersive and emotive artist, she embodies her work. As she drew inspiration from landscapes, skies, caves, and florals, her marks became increasingly frenzied, with inks more layered, allowing denser and thicker images to emerge. These works reflect the uninhabited and chaotic elements of wilderness and their effects on an artist in process. For a panel work inspired in part by Jan Brueghel’s Allegory of Tulip Mania, Al-Hadid was led into her own tulip mania. She collected swathes of bulbs, planted shrubs, and flowers, letting the habits of her newfound environment imprint upon her practice. Her references are never obvious to the viewer; she hints at works that move and intrigue her, obscuring the narrative but letting the foundations remain. A deeply intuitive artist, Al-Hadid may alter her work based on temperament, creating compositions imbued with the emotionality of their inspirative stories, histories, and physical gestures. Al-Hadid often looks at outsider histories – her work asks what it means to be at the periphery. In this case, to observe nature from the outside, to be at the margins of the natural world – to examine that which encroaches from an edge, or sneaks in from the corner. Like nature's untamed edges, Al-Hadid's works in Wild Margins embrace the unruly and wild edges of paper – while their complex sea of details and masterful fine lines create a body of work so layered and storied it transcends far beyond the physical realm it occupies.   

Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid's family immigrated to Cleveland when she was five years old. Al-Hadid received a BA and a BFA in sculpture from Kent State University, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2007, she was resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and in 2009, she was a USA Rockefeller Fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She was the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2007), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2011), and The Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2020). In 2021, she was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship to conduct research at the Freer Gallery of Art. Her mosaic murals for NYC’s Penn Station were among 100 finalists for COD awards, an international competition honoring public commissions that integrate interior, architectural, or public spaces. Al-Hadid was one of four artists commissioned for a site-specific work at the Princeton University Art Museum. She has given lectures at the Nasher Sculpture Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University, to name a few. For her first major public art project Al-Hadid was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York and exhibited by Mad. Sq. Art, the contemporary art program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy and later installed on the campus of Williams College. She has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Art21, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her work can be found in numerous museums and private collections.