'This volume is published on the occasion of the exhibition Zaha Hadid: Early Paintings and Drawings (8 December 2016 – 12 February 2017) at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London. 

Zaha Hadid (1950 – 2016) was a pioneering and visionary architect and artist who left behind an extraordinary body of work. Her interests lay in the interface between architecture, landscape and geology, and her creative energy, as she stated herself, was put into the attempt to override nature’s principles of gravity and death.

Since the beginning, Hadid used drawing and painting to visualise her radical ideas of dynamism; abstraction and fragmentation as tools to investigate and imagine her architectural projects. Her buildings, often characterised by their weightlessness and sense of floating, underscore her profound understanding of, and an attempt to reconstruct the early 20th century avant-garde and its utopian ideals. 

This hardcover die-cut publication presents Hadid as an artist through her paintings, calligraphic sketches and drawings. It traces the development of her early career by exploring the processes, sketches and visions that eventually led to the creation of her signature buildings.' - extracted from Serpentine Galleries' website

With a foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yana Peel. Features newly-commissioned and previously unpublished texts. Includes contributors' biographies.