Zaha Hadid: Early Paintings and Drawings

The show focuses on Hadid’s early works before her first building was erected in 1993 (Vitra Fire Station in Germany) and presents her paintings and drawings from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

The exhibition takes place at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, renovated and extended by Zaha Hadid Architects in 2013.

Drawing and painting were fundamental to Hadid’s practice. Influenced by Malevich, Tatlin and Rodchenko, she used drawings as the main method for visualising her architectural ideas.

For Hadid, painting was a design tool, and abstraction an investigative structure for imagining architecture and its relationship to the world we live in.

These works on paper and canvas unravel an architecture that Hadid was determined to realise in built structures and is seen in the characteristic lightness and weightlessness of her buildings.

Conceived as Hadid’s manifesto of a utopian world, the show reveals her all-encompassing visions of arranging space and interpreting realities.