In the ceremonial Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace, in the same place where Santiago Calatrava exhibited three years ago, an exhibition of Zaha Hadid opened: about three hundred of her characteristic “cosmic” works from paintings and architectural models to world-famous shoes, vases and other design items. The curator of the exhibition is Ksenia Malich from the State Hermitage, who worked on the first Russian superstar staff together with Hadid's London office.
However, the heroine could not come to the opening of the exposition on Friday, June 26 - after twenty minutes of waiting, Mikhail Piotrovsky told reporters that "Zakha is not feeling well." Partner and bureau director Patrick Schumacher, however, was present. According to Mikhail Piotrovsky, the exhibition was created in the shortest possible time, although the idea arose eleven years ago, when Zakhe, the first woman among the Pritzker Prize winners, was presented with it in 2004 at the Hermitage Theater.
In the spirit of current trends, the exhibition can be accessed from three different halls. But it is more correct to enter the Nikolaev Hall from the gallery of portraits of the Romanovs - here the visitor is greeted by Malevich's Black Square, the original, but the smallest and latest of the four "squares"
In 2002 entered the Hermitage from the Inkombank collection. The black square here at the most opportune moment denotes the role of the Russian avant-garde in general and Malevich's Suprematism in particular on the work of the famous Englishwoman of Iraqi origin - Zakha has repeatedly emphasized that it was the Russian avant-garde that was an important source of inspiration for her. Emphasizing this connection, next to the "Black Square" is Hadid's painting "Tectonist Malevich". Further, the paths of inspection are divided into three "roads" in some kind of epic even spirit: to the right - paintings and early projects illustrating the refraction of Suprematism in the early work of Hadid. Left design: shoes, cars, cutlery and yachts of space design. Straightforward - contemporary designs and buildings.
However, love for the Russian avant-garde became the main focus of the exhibition. As Mikhail Piotrovsky writes in the catalog, “the Russian avant-garde liberated the artist in space, made him the master of all dimensions, first on paper, then in reality. It was this feature of the Russian avant-garde that Zakha gladly embraced and turned into a real force, powerful and unusual … The smooth sides of the squares were refracted into bizarre curves. Calligraphy is one of the types of abstract art."
The exposition is neatly built not only biographically, from early unrealized projects to completed ones, but also typologically: paintings, photographs, projects and designs are separated, but interrelated. The exhibition is built into the spacious rectangle of the Nikolaev banquet hall by means of white partitions of fluid, plastic Hadid's outlines. Sculptural partitions divide the hall into smaller spaces, connected by cutouts of large, energetically overhanging "portals" - both the viewer and the exhibits are placed inside a characteristic flexible matter. But I must say that the fluidity is comparatively restrained: Zaha can, if desired, bend much steeper - and is torn, since all spaces are open, and if you look higher, you will see Corinthian columns, Nikolaev crystal vases and the pompous grisaille of the ceiling of the hall, decorated in 1837 by the project of Vasily Petrovich Stasov. The dialogue between the magnificent imperial classicism and Zaha's futuristic energy turns out to be very articulate - tradition and anti-tradition, both are very strong in their own way, - it was not without reason that Mikhail Piotrovsky spoke at the opening of the "great challenge and many disputes" associated with the placement of such a modern exhibition in the front the interiors of the royal palace.
Having passed the first part of the exposition with designer items and paintings, the viewer finds himself in the center of the exposition, where architectural projects are placed. Space layouts in paper form turn out to be somewhat flat and do not particularly attract attention, being glued to the upper beams of exhibition structures, but layouts made of plastic and glass, placed closer to the audience, are seen better - they are arranged in a long chain, which provokes a winding promenade from project to project. Perhaps somewhere in the exhibition there is not enough space, which three years ago Calatrava had quite enough - the deconstructivist power of the models is constrained. Perhaps the whiteness of the layouts, which compensates for the excess of plasticity and denotes the difference from flat, but colored paintings, turns into monotony - but on the whole, the exhibition looks like a rich academic catalog that gives a comprehensive idea of the superstar's work.
There are no secret buttons, like Calatrava's, at the exhibition. But the space of the corners is filled with furniture, the close proximity of which to the models allows us to assess the similarity with architecture. For Hadid, after all, all objects, both large and small, bend, obeying either a technique - a manner, or something more, some kind of undiscovered law of non-Euclidean stereometry. Building from wall to fork with a spoon, a world in which - who knows why, but everything should bend, dying in a strange dance. Such are the rules for the behavior of matter in the chaotic movement of space by Zaha Hadid. Stasov had one rule, Zakha had another.
