The Brooklyn Rail

The twenty-five works on view in Diana Al-Hadid’s debut solo show at Kasmin present an artist at the height of her powers, practiced in aligning the behavior of her materials—primarily gypsum, bronze, steel, and linen pulp paint—with the conceptual contours of her message. Except paper pulp, which she introduced this year during a residency at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, Al-Hadid has been working with these materials for over a decade. Since the fluid lines of her built-up floor sculptures and wall reliefs sit on the cusp between figuration and abstraction, the meanings they summon are multivalent. Yet a prominent strand of Al-Hadid’s message is the observation that when we reach deep down into cultural history—primarily classical mythology, Islamic and Christian stories, as well as their depictions in visual art—we expose the deep sedimentation of our contemporary biases, especially as they relate to women and mothers. That the work engages this kind of structural thinking, transcending the particularities of any one situation, is made clear by Al-Hadid’s title, “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things.” It imperfectly cites the 1987 book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who argues that metaphors guide our ordinary conceptual system. “Absolutely everything in life is a metaphor,” Al-Hadid noted during a gallery walkthrough. Her work aims a sharply critical eye at the shortcomings of binary and hierarchical thinking by presenting a cast of women protagonists who erupt upwards even as they melt, and who pierce us with their gaze even as they flicker in and out of visibility.

The mostly greyscale gypsum and fiberglass ground of the towering wall relief The Bronze Chamber of Danae (2023) is covered in shimmering vertical runoff of gold varnish. The effect is a strong downward force which leads the eye to a gaping hole at bottom center, contained only by the broken lower margin of the work, as if something has left the picture. This is where Danae should sit, imprisoned in a round columned room (following a painted rendition by Jan Gossaert on which Al-Hadid based the relief). According to myth, Danae was shut in a bronze chamber to prevent bearing the son prophesied to kill her father, King Acrisius of Argos. Zeus impregnated her nevertheless, bypassing the gilded cage in the form of golden rain. This material transformation prefigures another, when the son conceived here—Perseus—later murders Medusa, the monster whose gaze changes human bodies to stone, a fate conferred as punishment for being raped by Poseidon. Al-Hadid’s Medusa appears, in turn, on an adjacent gallery wall in the form of another large-scale wall relief. Like Danae, the evidence of Medusa’s body is largely absent, as a swarm of writhing blue and beige hair frames a lozenge-shaped vacancy. In absenting the representation of these mythical figures from her work, Al-Hadid seems to suggest not an alternative narrative in which assaulted women escape their fate, but the cumulative effect that tweaking their stories might have on the present.

The binaries that Al-Hadid’s works surface—such as right/wrong, male/female, liquid/solid, up/down, weak/strong—extend to her use of materials. At Kasmin, we see Al-Hadid working for the first time with paper, an ephemeral material made with water. This new material appears alongside her longstanding practice of casting in bronze, a permanent material made malleable by fire. The apparent opposition here helps us see that, in Al-Hadid’s hands, binaries never hold. The magisterial bronze In Mortal Repose (2011), on view on the gallery’s rooftop garden, gives us a headless body in contemporary dress, almost entirely melted save for her upper torso. Even the patriarchal visual language of the monumental concrete plinth on which she rests cannot resurrect her. In contrast, less durable works painted with paper pulp, like the emblematic Mad Medusa (2023) on abaca paper, stamp out some of the most forceful images in the show. Or look to the windswept filaments in bronze that encircle the central figure of Seed (2023). These were made by the direct burnout of spray foam, inverting our expectations of material permanence. Thus Al-Hadid’s material play aligns with her subversion of the gendered narrative expectations that accompany the mythic stories she draws upon. Yet even despite deploying these conceptual throughlines across the board, Al-Hadid’s works never seem formulaic, since we see her clearly reveling in the responsiveness of materials acting in the studio, as evidenced by the unpredictability of dripping media or the stability of asymmetrical sculptures, like the ceiling-high Mother Splits the Moon (2023), that seem on the verge of collapse.

A component in the lower corner of the latter sculpture points to a more recent direction in Al-Hadid’s work, familiar to those who saw her 2018 room-like installation, enclosed by hedges, in Madison Square Park. This component is the honeycomb lattice of a beehive, cast in bronze (which also makes the sculpture site-specific, since it refers to Kasmin’s rooftop pollinator habitat and honey-producing hives). Al-Hadid began gardening at her upstate studio during the pandemic, one upshot of which has been introducing shocks of color into the new work. She also recognized a metaphor for immigration in the root-bound plant, and this orientation toward living matter, realized both through such explicit citations as the beehive and through integration with nature in outdoor installations, suggests a future-directed outlook toward growth, rather than excavation of the past. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, since continual shape-shifting between domains of thought, understanding one conceptual realm in terms of another, is among Al-Hadid’s great strengths. Even as the work offers an alternative vision of the history of objects, one in which the structural biases that govern human thought were configured differently, Al-Hadid’s ambition is not simply giving voices to women or flipping the script. It is nothing less than the reshaping of knowledge. Another way of saying this might be that nothing is inevitable, and this formulation is future-oriented indeed.