September 17. 2015
Zaha Hadid
Art students, architects and photographers have been
storming Saint Petersburg's Winter Palace to view Zaha Hadid's summer-long
exhibition, a tribute to an art revolution launched in the imperial
Converging on the palace complex from across Russia,
the visitors have been shooting images of Ms. Hadid's paintings, sculptures and
architectural models - all part of the artist/architect's first retrospective
in Saint Petersburg, says Ksenia Malich, who is curating the show at the State
Hermitage Museum.
The 250 year-old palace now holds an edgy ensemble of
galleries for Ms. Hadid's artworks; stop-motion paintings that capture
skyscrapers or cities speeding across the skies; and her architecture -
buildings that seem to hover above the Earth, held aloft on beams of light.
"I won the Pritzker Prize in Saint
Petersburg," Zaha Hadid says in an interview, "so to do the new show there
is extraordinary."
On receiving The Pritzker Prize, architecture's
highest award, in a ceremony staged at the Hermitage, Ms. Hadid said that Saint
Petersburg's Suprematist art movement had launched a new age of creativity for
artists and architects around the world.
After tens of thousands of years of artistic
progression, spanning the early modern humans who painted their own hands onto
cave ceilings to the early Modern artists who speed-sketched impressions of
cafes, cathedrals or starlit skies, the Suprematists were the first to create
imaginary abstract worlds on canvas.
Revolutionizing the world of art by abruptly
abandoning the depiction of reality in painting, these pioneers of abstraction
"opened the possibility of unfettered invention," Ms. Hadid added.
Although the Suprematists flourished during the early
euphoria of the October Revolution in 1917, they faced escalating attacks as
Stalin moved to impose his diktats on Socialist Realist art and authoritarian
architecture across the Soviet Union.
"The Russian avant-garde explained to artists
they can be free - there are no restrictions on
Artists and architects under attack
Yet Ms. Hadid has helped give new life to the
Suprematist movement on the global stage and extend it to the sphere of
architecture, Mr. Piotrovsky adds in an interview.
It was while an architecture student in London, Ms.
Hadid recalls, that she became entranced by Suprematist paintings with simple
geometric shapes such as rectangles, circles and crosses - that drift dreamlike
across the canvases.
A new age in architecture
Across these painted worlds, she says, she perceived
an otherworldly anti-gravity and the portents for a new age in architecture.
In an epiphany, she adds, she saw the potential for a structure or even an
entire cosmopolis to break free from the force of gravitation. She began
painting her visions of floating cities, in artworks like The Peak series,
now on view at the Hermitage exhibition, and her quest to transform these
drawings into architectural projects that appear to defy Newton's law of
universal gravitation.
Through sophisticated engineering and design, Ms.
Hadid explains, "a building can appear to be floating, free from
gravity."
Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects,
says the Suprematist revolution unleashed a utopian creative explosion that
continues to reverberate through the spheres of art and architecture even
today, and that the studio aims to harness these forces in its own designs.
While the leaders of Russia's avant-garde and their
calls for cultural freedom were crushed across the Soviet Union, Zaha Hadid has
helped engineer a renaissance of their art and ideals across the West. In
the center of Zurich, she paid homage to these fallen art revolutionaries by
designing a show at theGmurzynska Gallery that juxtaposed
Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich, the founder of the movement, with
Hadid's own sculptures and prints.
Kazimir Malevich, the founder of the movement, with
Hadid's own sculptures and prints.
Ms. Hadid transformed the Swiss gallery into a
supersize Suprematist artwork that explorers could trek through, says the
Gmurzynska Gallery's director, Mathias Rastorfer.
A timeless glow in Zaha Hadid's designs
"There is a timelessness to the Suprematist
artworks," says Mr. Rastorfer, which likewise shines through Zaha Hadid's
paintings and architecture.
The London-based architect similarly transmuted the
Guggenheim Museum in New York when she designed The Great Utopia exhibition
on Russia's avant-garde, says Thomas Krens, director emeritus of the Guggenheim
Foundation.
Mr. Krens, who later filled the Guggenheim Museum with
Hadid's own canvases and maquettes for a massive retrospective, says she is
part of the pantheon of utopian architects, alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and
Frank Gehry, whose structures have the rare ability to completely transfigure
their surroundings.
As head of the Guggenheim Foundation, Krens
commissioned Frank Gehry to design the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; the groundbreaking
sculpture-like titanium structure triggered a spiraling metamorphosis of the
entire Basque city in a phenomenon now called "the Bilbao
Effect." Zaha Hadid's cultural projects have sparked a similar
sweeping "transformative effect" on the wider cosmopolis, the
Guggenheim's erudite director adds in an interview.
Suprematist utopia realized
Zaha Hadid says the Suprematists were just one of the
groups of utopian artists or architects who set out to create a new world but
faced opposition from an authoritarian government.
Yet through struggle, she adds, "the utopia is
eventually realized."
The paintings and architectural designs she has
unveiled at the Winter Palace, she says, "are infused with the Suprematist
idea of creative freedom." In that sense, she adds, the reemergence of the
Suprematist spirit in Saint Petersburg "is really amazing."
Hans Ulrich Obrist, a co-director at the Serpentine
Galleries in London who commissioned Ms. Hadid to design the expansion of the
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, says the Pritzker Prize laureate "has
contributed to the revival of the Russian avant-garde through her extraordinary
drawings, through her architecture and through her exhibitions."
"It's wonderful that Zaha's work is now coming to
the country whose artists inspired her breakthroughs," he says. "By
returning to Saint Petersburg, the Suprematist revolution is really coming full
circle."
