VCU alumna earns spotlight for “elegant and riveting” sculptures

VCU alumna Diana Al-Hadid, who received her M.F.A. degree in the Department of Sculpture in 2005, has attracted a great deal of attention during her young career, including recognition this month in ArtNews magazine as one of six “Artists to Watch.”

The magazine’s profile article highlights the maturity and complexity of Al-Hadid’s work, which has been show in exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Berlin, Philadelphia and Miami, among other locations.

Gregory Volk, an independent curator and associate professor at VCU, told ArtNews that Al-Hadid’s “works are so advanced and elegant and riveting, but also distressed, rickety, ungainly. There’s a kind of dialectic between creation and destruction, and it makes her work seem very apt for these times.”

Al-Hadid is represented by the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York. The gallery hosted a show in the fall of Al-Hadid’s sculptures and drawings, attracting a number of collectors. Her work will appear next month at the Saatchi Gallery in London in a show called “Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East,” and she will introduce a new sculpture at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates in March, according to ArtNews.