Ghost in the Machine: Diana Al-Hadid in Lost Paradise at Marianne Boesky

Diana Al-Hadid was recently recruited to Marianne Boesky Gallery and given her first showing there this summer in Lost Paradise, a three-person exhibition that also included Mathias Kessler and Julião Sarmento.  Previous New York solo spots for this Syria-born artist from Ohio, whose New York debut was at the Bronx Museum in 2006, took place at Perry Rubenstein Gallery.  True to form, her latest mixed-media sculpture is ambitious in scale and layered, whether in texture, reference or emotional content.  Earlier works explored richly suggestive imagery of collapsing towers and vulnerable machines, using lustrous formal means to suggest complex structures frozen in a moment of implosion.  The themes of time and motion arrested are followed through in Trace of a Fictional Third with its cascades of dripping forms and other signifiers of liquidity and flow; the piece also marks an early foray by Al-Hadid into figuration, though characteristically her draped forms, while convincingly, indeed almost voluptuously corporeal, have spectral connotations: ghosts within the machine, a haunted spectacle.

July 7 to August 5, 2011 at 509 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212-680-9889