Shortly after completing architecture school, Zaha Hadid won a competition to build a luxury resort in Hong Kong. Hadid had no real building experience. What convinced the developer to hire her were some spectacular abstract paintings in which she depicted the future resort as a set of Suprematist forms emerging from a mountain.
Whether the resort could actually be constructed remains an open question. The project collapsed when the British agreed to return Hong Kong to China, and Hadid never returned to her concept. But the paintings remain stunning artworks in their own right, highlights of a Hadid's first posthumous retrospective now on view at the Palazzo Franchetti in Venice.
The exhibition documents Hadid's landmark buildings (such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome), and includes renderings of new works in progress. These projects demonstrate her firm's mastery of digital media, and underscore the fact that much of her work would be unfathomable without computers. They equally show the pertinence of her abstract artwork.
Hadid painted incessantly in the decade after she finished architecture school. Her paintings twisted space according to her whim. She manipulated gravity and collided perspectives to make compositional sense. In the process, she invented the warped visual language that would ultimately define her buildings.
The transition from paintings to buildings was facilitated by technology. Software and new materials allowed Hadid to engineer her illusions. She came of age at the right moment. She had opportunities that were unfathomable to Kasimir Malevich and Lazar Khidekel.
However Hadid's achievement was not inevitable. She was able to transition from fantastical structures in Hong Kong to concrete buildings worldwide because of the flexibility with which she interpreted her paintings while working digitally. Software allowed her to discover viable equivalents to her arbitrary physics.
Zaha Hadid's paintings were abstract studies in spatial psychology. Her breakthrough was to make buildings psychologically resonate like her paintings.
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