Diana Al-Hadid: The Four Seasons
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Diana Al-Hadid's The Four Seasons comprises four new panel paintings that expand the artist's engagement with the natural world. Each panel features a landscape in distinct palettes and tonalities that demonstrate a passage of time: icy blues and purples allude to snow-covered mountaintops in [Winter], lush green and bright yellow see budding flowers in [Spring], an abundance of golds, purples, and reds suggest turning foliage in [Fall], and deep blues and pinks generate the warmth of a summer sky in [Summer]. Situated at the convergence of abstraction and landscape painting traditions, The Four Seasons deepens Al-Hadid’s investigation of nature as an allegory for the human experience, turning to a subject with universal resonance: the seasonal cycles of life.
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With these works, Al-Hadid continues to explore elements of the natural landscape, including mountains, trees, and flowers, as emblems of the social, psychological, religious, or folkloric narratives that inform human culture. Al-Hadid’s increased exposure to the changing seasons since moving to the Hudson Valley in 2019 has shifted her creative focus toward her ever-changing surroundings. A heightening of the senses, imposed by this reconnection with the natural world, reverberates through these works.
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“It’s all line and plane, just drip or pool. That’s the organizing principle of how I build form.”
—Diana Al-Hadid -
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Developing Al-Hadid’s rigorous study of art history, The Four Seasons blends Northern European and Hudson River School painting references and the artist’s personal encounters with nature. The tree at the center of a fantastical Flemish painting reemerges as a compositional device in [Summer], indicative of Al-Hadid’s proclivity to reimagine elements of cultural histories. Elsewhere, jasmine flowers, a fragrant plant embedded in the artist’s memory and a recurring motif in her practice, grow alongside foliage native to the northeastern United States in [Spring], approaching the genre of the world landscape while pointing to an autobiographical experience of the environment.
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These four panels highlight Al-Hadid’s innovative and gestural brushwork, a signature feature of her three-dimensional paintings. Through methodically controlled dripping, Al-Hadid cleverly weaves positive and negative space to form complex compositions that recall both human-made and organic creations.
The Four Seasons contributes to Al-Hadid’s singular, career-defining reexamination of the stories and narrative frameworks that define human culture, often drawing from mythology, religion, and art history. Her exhaustive research, evidenced in her ongoing preparation for a major site-specific installation at the Princeton University Art Museum and her recent Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, have resulted in explorations of storytelling frameworks ranging from Greek myths to the allegories of Hans Memling in panel paintings, freestanding sculptures, and works on paper.
In 2025, Al-Hadid will unveil a monumental, site-specific installation for the Princeton University Art Museum’s newly-constructed building. -
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About the Artist
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