Diana Al-Hadid at Frieze Los Angeles: Booth D6

Booth D6 | February 20–23, 2025
Santa Monica Airport
3027 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405

Kasmin returns to Frieze Los Angeles in February 2025 with a solo presentation of new wall panels and a sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid (b. 1981). In the series of panels, Al-Hadid explores the interplay of sky and landscape as a compositional foundation for her richly allegorical work. Known for her alchemical approach to material, Al-Hadid employs a controlled dripping technique, interlacing mass and void through complex layers of polymer gypsum, fiberglass, pigments, and metal leaf. By engaging with architectural forms—referencing ruins, historical structures, and sacred spaces—the work considers the impermanence of civilization and the ambiguous presence of the human figure. As they invoke ghostly apparitions of art historical characters and landscapes, Al-Hadid’s abstracted sculptural narratives allude to themes of memory, empire, and migration.

Frieze marks the first Los Angeles solo presentation in ten years for Al-Hadid, whose first of numerous solo museum exhibitions was held at the Hammer Museum at UCLA in 2010, and anticipates Diana Al-Hadid: unbecoming, a two-decade survey of Al-Hadid’s work at the MSU Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI, in June 2025. Also in 2025, Al-Hadid will unveil a major site-specific sculpture at Princeton University Art Museum’s new building

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Al-Hadid revisits the theme of the jasmine plant, the national flower of Syria, in a unique bronze sculpture also on view. Expanding her recent engagement with the natural world, the artist has cast a set of roots pulled from her recent commission at Cleveland’s Syrian Cultural Garden for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in 2022 to create Warda II (2024-25). She has described her Warda sculptures as a metaphor for the immigrant experience: when root-bound plants grow, their roots push to the edges of their pots before learning to adapt to new soil. Warda II offers an emblem of human resilience in the face of adversity, highlighting the natural ability to find stability in new terrain.

Frieze Los Angeles looks forward to the opening of Al-Hadid’s survey exhibition at the MSU Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI, from June 7 through December 21, 2025. Diana Al-Hadid: unbecoming will question how constructions of femininity take form over time through nearly two decades of paintings, sculptures, and works of handmade paper realized especially for the exhibition. It will position the artist’s reworking of materials and form as a process that models how we can similarly transform the social expectations about womanhood and women’s behavior to instead find the power in being “unbecoming.”

In late 2025, Al-Hadid will unveil a site-specific sculpture on the grounds of the Princeton University Art Museum’s new building. Inspired by her research in the museum’s collection of ancient art, including works from near her birthplace of Aleppo, Al-Hadid will create a monumental work that The New York Times has described as “a ghostly ziggurat in aluminum.” Al-Hadid has said of the work, “I am interested in the suggestion that this ancient structure might lay stored—in some ways buried—within a very contemporary new building.”