The Madison Square Garden Conservancy kicks-off its thirty-sixth outdoor art exhibition with the installation, Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter.
Six site-specific sculptures have been installed in Madison Square Park, entitled Delirious Matter by the Brooklyn-based artist Diana Al-Hadid.
Two of the six installations are combined with rows of hedges to form a room, suggesting the beauty of deteriorating structures nestled into plant material, featured in pictures above and below. The two walls, on the Oval Lawn, measure thirty-six feet long by fourteen feet high and twenty-two feet long by fourteen feet high. Since they are porous structures, they allow viewer to see through.
One of the walls “depicts Gradiva, a reference to the twentieth-century mythological female character from a novella by Wilhelm Jensen.” The second wall is inspired by an early Netherlandish painting called Allegory of Chastity by Hans Memling.
Of the six new sculptures, three are entitled ‘Synonym’ and sit on plinths, displayed on the surrounding lawns. They are figures of reclining females, each pictured below.
In Madison Square Park’s Reflecting Pool is a spectacular “bust of a female figure perched atop a fragmented mountain.” As with the second wall, the sculpture in the Reflecting Pool was inspired by “an early Netherlandish painting called Allegory of Chastity by Hans Memling, of a female figure protruding from a mountaintop, the rocky formation suggesting an overgrown skirt around her waist.”
Delirious Matter is the first project by Al-Hadid for the Conservancy, and it is the first Conservancy commission to unite sculpture with plant materials.
This project has been organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director, and Martin Friedman, Senior Curator of Madison Square Art: Julia Friedman, Curatorial Manager, and Tom Reidy, Senior Project Manager.
The exhibition, Delirious Matter by artist, Diana Al-Hadid will be on view from May 14 through September 3, 2018 in Madison Square Park, located between East 23rd Street and East 26th Street, and between Madison Avenue and the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue.
Simultaneous to Delirious Matter’s display in Madison Square Park, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has organized Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter, which will be on view in the Bronx from July 18 to October 14, 2018. Register on Eventbrite Here.
Join in with the hashtags #MadSqArt, #DianaAlHadid, and #MadSqDeliriousMatter
While you’re there, check out the five Bee Hives that call Madison Square Park home.
In addition, check out 36 more Events, Exhibits and Installations not to miss in May.