Another exhibition featuring Zaha Hadid’s swirly, blobby, and cool lacquered-fiberglass furniture .
This New York show, seen in a few rooms at Sonnabend and in the
magnificent recently-vacated garage at 169 10th Avenue, are an excellent
catalogue of Where Zaha Hadid Is Going and Where She Has Been. The
strength of the show is that the works cover the major categories these
furniture/installations/interventions/spaceblobs are exploring, even as
they attempt to blur the line between furniture, sculpture, and
architecture. The pieces can be generally categorized as freestanding
seats, freestanding big chunks, and wall reliefs. Ironically it is the
last category where the pieces become less interesting.
The large installations have potential, either as real
buildings (like the Chanel Pavilion, in Central Park at the moment) or
as site-inflected structures, but as artifacts in the gallery they just
don’t make sense, yet.
The scale of the freestanding big chunks
(Belu, which had messy seam joins) suggest that they can be both part of
a larger landscape as well as make space in and of themselves. It is
the Tony Smith school of landscape architecture, but one that has
payoffs with Hadid’s particular forms and process. Stalactites,
clusters of big chunks suspended from the ceiling, cuts the gallery
space up, guiding traffic, creating eddies to pause in, and with the low
lighting in the final installation creates some wonderful shadows. The
piece is a step forward in this process.
The freestanding furniture pieces are mostly forgettable, with the powerful exception of Orchis, which like Stalactites capitalizes on its reference to nature, while also freezinginto solids hyperbolic forms that are only made visible by computer. In this case Orchis creates seating that is almost always the same, but always brilliantly different. The forms are always hypertwisted planes, some such that it is difficult to understand how they were made at all. And their leaf-green-metallic color perfectly references them to the leaves and flowers of orchids, while at the same time keeping them on the cutting edge.
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