UltraStellar by Zaha Hadid Architects
Updated: Jan 21, 2020
UltraStellar is Zaha Hadid’s final collection of furniture for her long-term gallerist and close friend David Gill under the creative direction of Francis Sultana, CEO of the gallery.The collection will celebrate Zaha’s genius with brand new pieces and several pieces that extend existing collections and ideas from 2012-14.
This new show of work continues on the journey that Zaha first began with the gallery in 2007 but for the first time, for the main body of this new collection, Zaha has, maybe surprisingly, employed more traditional materials including walnut, silver, glass and leather, which sit alongside her most loved of media, clear acrylic.
The shapes in this new collection reveal Zaha’s continuing dialogue with single fluid and sinuous lines, complex interactions are on show within a bowl and coffee table, single and twin chair, dining table and chandelier. Several pieces have been fashioned in walnut, walnut and leather and walnut and acrylic and marry Zaha’s post-modern manipulation of the most contemporary of materials acrylic but here with the most traditional, wood. The new work reveals a love of this natural finish; the worked and smooth surface of the walnut and leather upholstery seamlessly flowing into each of the other elements. Arms and legs, tops and bases merge into each other in a continual conversation. Just as Zaha’s architecture rejected boxes and corridors so too these new pieces further extend that concept, creating furniture that flows and seemingly adapts around the human form, embracing as opposed to conforming.
Three new pieces have been designed to further extend the hugely popular Liquid Glacial collection of furniture. Two console shapes and also a bowl design made in the collection’s signature material, a milled and hand-polished acrylic. The elegant beauty of the bowl appears to ripple outwards from its centre into a less defined edge capturing the moment as though a stone has just been dropped or a rain-drop has just fallen. This new bowl shape will also be made in sterling silver.
Photos by Martin Slivka
