New York’s Kasmin gallery now represents Diana Al-Hadid, an artist whose sculpture-based practice looks to the histories of ancient civilizations as a way to process today’s most pressing issues. The gallery will present two new works by the artist in its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach week. She will continue to work with San Francisco–based gallery Berggruen and L.A.-based gallery Morán Morán.
Born in Aleppo, Syria, raised in Ohio, and now based between Upstate New York and Brooklyn, Al-Hadid has created an expansive body of work that is informed by art history, architecture, ancient cosmologies, female archetypes, cartographies, and more. It examines issues related to immigration, women’s empowerment and self-representation, and shows how history is not always as fixed as some may think it is. Al-Hadid’s work ranges from large-scale sculptural installation works to wall-hung objects that resemble cut-out paintings.
She is currently the subject of a survey at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and has also had solo shows at the San José Museum of Art in California (2017), the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York (2018), and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (2019). In 2018, she presented six commissioned art works in New York’s Madison Square as part of a public art exhibition titled “Delirious Matter.”
Al-Hadid has received several prestigious grants and fellowships, including a United States Artists Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and the Arts and Letters Award in Art from the American Academy. Earlier this year, she was selected to be a fellow for the Smithsonian’s Artist Research Fellowship Program. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum in New York, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions.
In an email, Eric Gleason, a senior director at Kasmin, said, “Diana Al-Hadid is one of the most distinct voices in 21st-century sculpture and someone we at Kasmin have followed closely and known personally for many years. It has been a longtime dream to represent Diana and her extraordinary work.”