Zaha Hadid's early paintings and the birth of her architectural vision

Before Zaha Hadid ever poured concrete or bent steel, she painted. The Iraqi-British architect who became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize treated the canvas as a laboratory, a place where buildings could be invented long before any foundation was dug. Her paintings from the late 1970s through the 1990s are now understood as a crucial body of work in their own right, large, layered and dizzyingly abstract.

They sit within the broader history of women artists who used unconventional materials to claim space in male-dominated fields. Hadid trained at the Architectural Association in London, where her contemporaries were sketching axonometrics while she produced dense, painterly compositions reading between Malevich, Constructivism and abstract expressionism. She once said she painted to understand architecture, to follow ideas further than a working plan allowed.

The Woman Gallery has explored similar territory, including Morisot's modern life, and Hadid belongs firmly in that lineage of artists who refused to stay inside the lines drawn for them.

What follows is a close look at those paintings: how they grew out of Suprematist theory, how they functioned as architectural research, and why they have begun to attract serious attention in galleries far beyond architecture, including here in Australia where her work has long resonated with collectors and curators.

The Malevich foundation and Suprematist roots

Hadid's debt to Kazimir Malevich is explicit. Her early catalogues and interviews name him repeatedly, and her "Malevich's Tektonik" series from the early 1990s pays direct homage to the Russian avant-garder's architectonic abstractions. Where Malevich reduced the world to floating geometric planes, Hadid pushed those planes off the canvas and into imagined space.

Her reading of Suprematism was never purely formal. Hadid was drawn to the political and utopian aspirations of the Russian avant-garde, the belief that abstract form could reshape society. Her paintings carry that ambition, functioning as proposals for a world built differently. Australian viewers familiar with the National Gallery of Victoria's holdings of Constructivist and Suprematist work will recognise echoes in her compositions.

Painting as research, not decoration

For Hadid, painting was never a leisure activity but a way of working. Her early canvases were often produced alongside, or in preparation for, the competitions that defined her career through the 1980s and early 1990s. The Hong Kong Peak project, the Berlin Kurfürstendamm competition, the Cardiff Bay Opera House entries: all were accompanied by paintings that pushed the formal ideas further than architectural renderings alone could.

The canvas was where architectural ideas could be broken open, where gravity could be defied and programme suspended. Her paintings show impossible perspectives, staircases leading nowhere, walls floating free of any ground. That quality has made her work attractive to contemporary painters in Australia, particularly those showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney or in smaller commercial galleries in Collingwood and Fitzroy.

Geometry, landscape and the calligraphic line

Look closely at Hadid's early paintings and three preoccupations recur. The first is geometric fragmentation, the slicing of space into planes that refuse to settle. The second is landscape, often an imagined or remembered landscape from Iraq, abstracted into ridges, rivers and valleys. The third is the calligraphic line, a sweeping, gestural mark that runs through the composition like a river through a continent.

Together these elements give her paintings a tension between the rational and the intuitive. The geometry holds the composition together, the landscape gives it weight, and the calligraphic line gives it breath. Her palette tends toward bone white, slate grey, ochre and deep Prussian blue, with occasional streaks of red that cut through like a wound or a flag.

How the paintings prefigured the built work

Many of the moves that later defined Hadid's built architecture appear first in her paintings. The Vitra Fire Station of 1993 takes its sharp angular forms directly from the painted studies that preceded it. The Heydar Aliyev Center, the Guangzhou Opera House, the London Aquatics Centre: each has its prototype somewhere in her canvases from a decade earlier.

This is not to suggest that her paintings were simply preparatory. They were autonomous works that happened to share vocabulary with her architecture, and in recent years curators have insisted on presenting them that way, refusing to subordinate them to the buildings they anticipated. That distinction matters in the broader conversation about women in architecture and art, where Hadid was often described as a "painter-architect," a phrase that subtly relegated her painted work to the status of sketch.

Exhibiting the paintings, from London to Melbourne

Major retrospectives at the Serpentine Galleries in London, the MAXXI in Rome and the Guggenheim in New York have dedicated substantial space to Hadid's paintings. In Australia, her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and has been discussed extensively within Melbourne's architectural circles.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has included her drawings and small paintings within broader surveys of contemporary abstraction, and Australia's commercial galleries in the inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney have been quick to recognise the market for her smaller works on paper. Auction results at the major Australian houses have begun to appear with greater frequency, and her market is rising partly because collectors now understand that her paintings are central, not peripheral, to her practice.

Reading the paintings today

Looking at Hadid's paintings requires a particular kind of attention. They reward slow looking, repeated visits, and a willingness to sit with strangeness rather than rushing toward interpretation.

A few notes for anyone approaching the early work for the first time:

• Stand back to take in the overall architecture of the composition before moving closer to read the brushwork.
• Notice how the horizon line behaves: in many paintings there is no fixed horizon at all, only competing proposals.
• Look for the calligraphic line, often painted quickly and with visible gesture, that anchors the geometry.
• Compare a painting to her built work: the relationship is rarely illustrative and almost always conceptual.
• Allow the work to feel strange rather than trying to decode it; her paintings reward sustained looking.

Hadid often spoke about the difficulty of working as a woman in architecture, a field that was, and remains, stubbornly male. Her paintings became a way of speaking back to a profession that did not always want to hear her, allowing her to claim space on her own terms and produce objects that belonged to her entirely. That history places her within a longer arc of women artists who used unconventional methods to claim authority, alongside Berthe Morisot's domestic scenes and Hilma af Klint's spiritual abstractions. For readers who want to follow these threads further, the Woman Gallery blog gathers essays on women artists across centuries and movements. Visit The Woman Gallery to explore further profiles of women who reshaped the visual arts, and to follow the ongoing conversation about painters, sculptors and architects whose work continues to expand what art can be.