Opera House Dubai (2006) is part of Hadid’s Silver Paintings series. With these works the artist bridges the gap between traditional painting and newly developed digital techniques. Each of the dozen works in the series corresponds to an architectural project of Hadid’s, elevating them to individual historical snapshots of the life cycle of Hadid’s designs, allowing viewers to examine the progression of each project. Opera House Dubai, however, is tied to an architectural project never realised. The design for the Opera House was scrapped after its announcement in 2008, due to the property crash in Dubai. Hadid’s grandiose plan included the main opera house, with 2,500 seat capacity and both free and paid parking, accompanied by a playhouse, a 54,000 square foot arts gallery, a performing arts school and a themed hotel.

Opera House Dubai is an early iteration of this design and perfectly encapsulates Hadid’s development of the tension between unfettered invention and freeness of form - whooshing lines and distorted space - and a tangible, mathematical architectural design. The undulating curves mimic the peaks and troughs of the sand dunes and mountains seen in the deserts. Meanwhile the building seems to rise from the surface of the ground. Across her portfolio, Hadid has proven her skill in marrying organic beauty and virtuosity with concrete meaning. The Silver Painting series embodies this and Hadid’s overarching journey to ‘capture a line, and the way a line changes and distorts...’ (Zaha Hadid cited in: John Seabrook, ‘The Abstractionist: Zaha Hadid’s unfettered invention’, The New Yorker, December 2009, online).

Dubbed the ‘Queen of the Curve’, Hadid continuously references the natural world in her cutting-edge creations. Through the masterful interplay between vivid lyricism and her pioneering push of new technologies, Hadid creates a perfect harmony between two opposing forces – the delicacy and fluidity of nature alongside a constantly evolving technical foundation. Reflecting on her embrace of this new digital hybrid, Hadid welcomes the ‘reciprocal relationship whereby our more ambitious design visions encourage the continuing development of the new digital technologies and fabrication techniques’, stating that this give-and-take dynamic in turn pushes her and her team to go even further in their designs (Zaha Hadid cited in: ‘interviews with zaha hadid: the architect’s work in her own words’, designboom, 2007, online).

The Silver Paintings started as digital images, which were then photographed, printed and hand-painted with a range of media on polyester skins treated with chrome and gelatine. The works were then mounted on aluminium Dibond. In Opera House Dubai, Hadid used acrylic ink and varnish to create an opaque finish. The dibond reflects a polished mirror effect, imbuing the pictorial scene with an ethereal, otherworldly feeling and inviting reflections of light into the picture plane. Although famous for her highly expressive architecture, Hadid was a celebrated painter and credits abstraction as the style that ‘opened the possibility of unfettered invention’ (Zaha Hadid cited in: John Seabrook, ‘The Abstractionist: Zaha Hadid’s unfettered invention’, The New Yorker, December 2009, online). Opera House Dubai remains a hauntingly beautiful example of the artist’s remarkable mastery of dynamic form, and of the ability for architecture to incorporate a sculptural quality alongside functionality.