Diana Shpungin

Last updated
Diana Shpungin
Diana Shpungin (artist).jpg
Diana Shpungin
Born
Riga, Latvia (former USSR)
NationalityAmerican
Education School of Visual Arts (MFA)
Known forSculpture, drawing, installation, hand-drawn pencil animation, performance
Notable work"Drawing Of A House (Triptych)" (2016)
Movement Contemporary Art Conceptual Art

Diana Shpungin is a Latvian-born American multidisciplinary artist. She is known for her work in drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, video, sound, and hand-drawn pencil animation. Her work explores non-traditional ideas of drawing through sculptural and time-based processes. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Diana Shpungin was born in Riga, Latvia under Soviet rule. As a child she emigrated with her family to the United States, where they settled in New York City. Shpungin earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and has taught and lectured at multiple institutions. She is currently an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design. [2]

Career

Early collaboration

Through the early 2000s, Shpungin engaged in a collaborative practice creating stylized, performative videos [3] and installations that explored themes like the intimacy of friendship. [4]

Themes and concepts

Diana Shpungin's "Drawing Of A House (Triptych)" Drawing Of A House 1.jpg
Diana Shpungin's "Drawing Of A House (Triptych)"

Shpungin's work often deals with themes of memory, longing, loss, and empathy. [1] Influenced by artists like Felix Gonzales-Torres, Shpungin uses deeply personal motifs and narratives in her drawings, sculptures, and video works, often combined with found objects to emphasize a concept that she refers to as “object empathy”. [5] [6] In her smaller sculptures and larger installations, Shpungin explores objects and architecture to emphasize contrasting themes such as domestic and communal, light and dark, or interior and exterior. [7]

Materiality

The use of graphite is a foundational element to Shpungin's work. In addition to drawings and hand-drawn animations, much of her sculptural work involves coating objects and spaces in an all-consuming layer of graphite. Writer Megan Garwood referred to this as “a penumbra, a motif of light and dark”. [6]

Notable works

"Drawing Of A House (Triptych)"

In 2015, Shpungin partnered with SiTE:LAB for an installation in Grand Rapids Michigan. [7] Shpungin chose an abandoned rectory, slated for redevelopment, and covered it in graphite by hand, employing the help of over one hundred participants. She drew nine hand-drawn animations that were rear-screen projected onto – and out of – the house's windows. [8] The project was both an aesthetic and historical evocation of collective memory. [9] Curator Caryn Coleman wrote:

“Diana Shpungin's Drawing Of A House (Triptych) has re-animated a vacant house into a living space once again. Covering the entire facade in graphite and projecting animations out of the windows, 333 Rumsey Street has become a transformative space that exists within a series of paradoxes: domestic and communal, drawing and sculptural, light and dark, interior and exterior. These opposing characteristics are not an aggressive disjuncture but poetically co-exist. . . Shpungin takes the political and, in this case, spiritual implications associated with 333 Rumsey Street on board to create a multi-media art object that doesn't seal itself off from the audience or acquire an entirely separate existence but, rather, establishes a bonding relationship between viewer and object.” [7]
Diana Shpungin's "Drawing Of A House (Triptych)" shown at night Drawing Of A House 2.jpg
Diana Shpungin's "Drawing Of A House (Triptych)" shown at night

"Untitled (Portrait Of Dad)"

In 2011 Shpungin showed her first solo work in New York after the end of a nearly decade-long collaboration. The exhibition included over a hundred drawings, hand-drawn animations, and sculptural scenarios including one ton of potatoes for the public to take, a reference to the Félix González-Torres piece from which the show took its name. The exhibition exemplafied Shpungin's primary use of graphite through the process of methodically hand-coating objects with the material. Such sculptures include a broken chair in "A Fixed Space Reserved for the Haunting" and a dead citrus sapling – complete with fallen leaves – in "I Especially Love You When You Are Sleeping" (both 2011). [3]

View of "Untitled (Portrait Of Dad)" by Diana Shpungin Untitled (Portrait of Dad).jpg
View of "Untitled (Portrait Of Dad)" by Diana Shpungin

Art critic Jerry Saltz said of Shpungin's work in a review in New York Magazine:

“Once upon the millennia, art was used to mourn and also usher the deceased into the afterlife. In “(Untitled) Portrait of Dad” Diana Shpungin delves into the emotions and aesthetics of loss. We see beautiful hand-drawn animations here, one of her father in his casket, another of the world as seen from his grave. A broken chair references an odd family superstition. Nearby, we see a small mountain of spuds for the taking, to be put in bags marked with her father's handwritten potato recipe. It's a moving and poetic experience, and touches on the more mystical things art can still do.” [10]

"Bright Light / Darkest Shadow"

In early 2020, Shpungin had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson titled ‘’Bright Light / Darkest Shadow’’. The show compiled nearly a decade of work, primarily hand-drawn animations. Seventeen animations, as well as source drawings for them, were shown along with animations from ‘’Drawing Of A House (Triptych)’’. Three additional video works were shown in a separate gallery, and two entirely new works were projected onto large sheets of drawing paper. Spanning multiple years, saw Shpungin explore recurring themes in the oeuvre such as memory, family, and loss, as well as showed her continuing exploration of the nature of drawing as a medium. [11]

View of Diana Shpungin: "Bright Light / Darkest Shadow" at MoCA Tucson Bright Light Darkest Shadow.jpg
View of Diana Shpungin: "Bright Light / Darkest Shadow" at MoCA Tucson

"Drawing For A Reliquary"

In 2021 Shpungin collaborated with Paul Amenta of SiTE:LAB on an outdoor sculpture commissioned by Franconia Sculpture Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The work, titled Drawing For a Reliquary, is a large-scale mixed-media installation made of various salvaged components and two fabricated steel truss structures, with every surface hand-drawn over with graphite pencil. The surface treatment summoned involvement from dozens of participants, allowing for the communal mark-making to be both a part of the work's present history and as an offering to the past. The adaptive nature of the work reacts specifically to objects/relics found on site in the sculpture park. From the three upright lifeless trees rescued from being burned in a bonfire, to the fallen forty-foot dead tree discovered in the woods, to the monumental forty-foot steel beam buried in a pile of metal at the park. Drawing For A Reliquary is framed by the park's backdrop and offers numerous views lining up the sculpture's sightlines with the distant horizons. The saw cut in the massive laid tree and end of the I-beam are encrusted in silver leaf as a way to elevate them, memorialize them and to denote empathy for one another. The addition of a selection of salvaged boulders act as a defining ritual-like framework and as a place to sit and contemplate. [12]

"Always Begin At The End"

At the start of 2022 Shpungin had a solo exhibition at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn.

Diana Shpungin's solo exhibition "Always Begin At The End" DianashpunginABATEinstallationview.pdf
Diana Shpungin's solo exhibition "Always Begin At The End"

The exhibition centered around a marble-tiled arena covering a significant portion of Smack Mellon's 4,000 square foot main gallery floor. The exhibition's title Always Begin At The End, and its acronym ABATE, signal to the way that time can loop, how stories can start in unexpected places, and how a journey's end might be less than its imagined start. A chandelier, a record player, seashells, chairs, chain link fencing, cast body parts, doors, cardboard boxes, a reconfigured American flag, and loose change add to the range of objects that Shpungin installed throughout the space. This exhibition features many objects made from cast paper, alongside combined found objects that the artist alters, construction materials, and a single hand-drawn pencil animation metaphorically smashed by rocks. Much of Shpungin's works can be seen as “drawings” in the sense that they are literally covered in drawing's most ubiquitous medium: graphite pencil. Shpungin painstakingly covers each object but does not obscure it, in a self-reflexive process that results in works which construct, change, and question themselves through the process of their own creation.

a work from 2022 titled "Pure Clean Power Deflation Rumination" Pure Clean Power Deflation Rumination.jpg
a work from 2022 titled "Pure Clean Power Deflation Rumination"

Upon the exhibition's closing, Diana Shpungin and Smack Mellon published an accompanying catalogue, also titled Always Begin At The End. In addition to documenting the artwork the publication features multiple writings on the content of the show: an introduction by curator Rachel Vera Steinberg, an essay by critic and philosopher Darla Migan, an interview between Shpungin and curator Gabriel de Guzman, and a work of poetry by the artist herself. In Migan's essay, To Make Bare The Shadow: On Diana Shpungin's Always Begin At The End, she writes: "The objects that comprise ABATE performatively rehearse the contradictions between the unstoppable march of time and our capacity to reorient the arrangements of life from whatever remains available for ongoing manipulation. Reeling in or spinning out from various failures of so-called "progress," this teetering between urgent criticism and slowed-down contemplation is felt in Shpungin's buoying acts of repetition." [13] The book was designed by Shpungin and designer Grant Carmichael in a way such that it can be read from front to back or vice versa, keeping true to the theme and title of the show itself. [14]

"Day For Night"

In conjunction with Always Begin At The End, a performance was held on February 3, 2022. Titled Day For Night, it incorporated a hybrid of experimental dance and ballet, choreographed by Shpungin in collaboration with classically trained ballet dancer Tatiana Nuñez, who performs the piece. An original experimental score by renowned musician Mick Rossi (of the Philip Glass Ensemble) accompanies the performance, into which he incorporated Shpungin's own amateur out-of-tune playing on her childhood piano shipped from Riga, Latvia. Day For Night also features costume design by renowned NYC fashion and costume designer David Quinn, who used the sculptural work from ABATE as inspiration. The title Day For Night, which is also the title of the score, references the eponymous 1973 film by François Truffaut who famously used a filter on the camera lens to turn footage shot during the daytime into night scenes.

Dancer Tati Nunez performs in Day For Night Day For Night.gif
Dancer Tati Nuñez performs in Day For Night

Exhibitions and press

Shpungin has exhibited extensively in both national and international venues including: The Bronx Museum of Art in Bronx, NY; SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY; the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, FL; Locust Projects in Miami, FL; Franconia Sculpture Park in Minneapolis, MN; the Futura Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic; Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France; Invisible-Exports in New York, NY; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York, NY; the Marc Straus Gallery in New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, NY; Site:Lab in Grand Rapids, MI; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY

Her work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Flash Art, New York Magazine, Art in America, The New York Times, Timeout London, and Le Monde among others. [1] Her work was the subject of an episode of PBS's Art Assignment, “Object Empathy” [5] and was cited in the introduction of Jerry Saltz's book "Seeing Out Louder". [15]

Accolades

Shpungin was awarded the 2019/20 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture and has been the recipient of awards, fellowships, and residencies with MacDowell, Art Omi, CEC Artslink, Dieu Donne, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, VLA Art and Law, Bronx Museum AIM Program, Guttenberg Arts, Islip Carriage House. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Barney</span> American contemporary artist

Matthew Barney is an American contemporary artist and film director who works in the fields of sculpture, film, photography and drawing. His works explore connections among geography, biology, geology and mythology as well as themes of conflict and failure. His early pieces were sculptural installations combined with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002, he created The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema." He is also known for his projects Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), River of Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Bontecou</span> American sculptor and printmaker (1931–2022)

Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leiko Ikemura</span> Japanese-Swiss painter and sculptor (born 1951)

Leiko Ikemura is a Japanese-Swiss artist who works in a variety of mediums, including oil painting, sculpture, and watercolor. She currently divides her time between Cologne and Berlin, teaching painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Active on the international art scene since the 1970s, she is known for her work within the Neo-Expressionism movement of the 1980s, as well as her continually evolving style. Much of her oeuvre features elements of symbolism, involving the creation of magical universes blend elements of her animals, humans, and plants. Her work has been featured in a number of solo exhibitions in countries across Japan and Europe, and is held in the permanent collections of major institutions such at the Centre Pompidou, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthaus Zurich, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In 2023, she had her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dannielle Tegeder</span>

Dannielle Tegeder is a contemporary artist who works with installation, animation and sound and is best known for her abstract paintings and drawings. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Times Square, Manhattan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Hart</span> American visual artist

Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bonnie Collura</span> American artist

Bonnie Collura is an American artist known for figurative multi-media sculptures, textiles and installations created by processes of compositing and sampling. Her art oscillates between abstraction and figuration, mixing aesthetics from baroque sculpture, contemporary animation and quilting with iconic fragments from pop culture, art history and myth. She has embraced theatricality and excess, intertextuality and digital-age influences in her work, often exploring hybridized, disjointed bodies, surrogate characters and reconfigured literary tropes. Sculpture critic Ann Landi has written, "Collura incorporates wildly diverse materials and processes while also drawing on a wide array of references—everything from cartoons and movies like Star Wars to highbrow texts such as The Prince and Frankenstein … Diffuse and open-ended, appealing to storytelling and world-making, her work continues to evolve, carrying on a feminist tradition in its materials and mythologies."

Saya Woolfalk is an American artist known for her multimedia exploration of hybridity, science, race and sex. Woolfalk uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions.

Lila Katzen, born Lila Pell, was an American sculptor of fluid, large-scale metal abstractions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Agee</span> American visual artist

Ann Agee is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."

Shana Moulton is a New York based media artist who explores contemporary anxieties through her filmic alter ego, Cynthia. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Cynthia's interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ree Morton</span> American sculptor

Ree Morton was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the postminimalist and feminist art movements of the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valerie Hegarty</span> American artist (born 1967)

Valerie Hegarty is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, trompe l’oeil states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances. Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets, romantic conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation. Sculpture critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blane De St. Croix</span>

Blane De St. Croix is an artist best known for his monumental landscape sculptures and installations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parvathi Nayar</span> Indian artist (born 1964)

Parvathi Nayar is a New Delhi born visual artist and creative writer. She is best known for her creative videos, sculptures, paintings, bookmaking and photography. She was one of 70 artists selected to be part of B70, the historical 70th anniversary birthday show of Amitabh Bachchan. One of her works, a 20-foot-high drawn sculpture artwork, was installed at New Mumbai airport on the opening day ceremony in 2014. Her work has also been collected by Singapore Art Museum, Sotheby's Institute of Art, The Australia India Institute and Deutsche Bank.

Yumi Janairo Roth is a Colorado-based visual artist who is known for her sculptures and site-responsive projects that explore themes of hybridity, immigration, and displacement. Working in diverse media, Roth's practice elevates the mundane, honors international craft techniques, and empowers the interloper to navigate unfamiliar places. Roth is an associate professor of Sculpture and Post-Studio Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Daniel Wiener is an American sculptor currently living and working in New York. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria Kisch</span> American artist

Gloria Kisch (1941–2014) was an American artist and sculptor known especially for her early post-Minimalist paintings and wall sculptures, and her later large-scale work in metal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nyeema Morgan</span> American visual artist

Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heide Fasnacht</span> American visual artist

Heide Fasnacht is a New York City-based artist who works in sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art. Her work explores states of flux, instability and transformation caused by human action and natural events. Since the mid-1990s, she has been known for sculptures and drawings that recreate momentary phenomena such as sneezes, geysers and demolitions—in sometimes abstract or cartoony form—that are temporally and spatially "frozen" for consideration of their aesthetic, perceptual, social or sensate qualities. In the late 2010s, she has expanded these themes in paintings that examine lost and neglected childhood sites, such as playgrounds and amusement parks. ARTnews critic Ken Shulman has described her work as "chart[ing] the fluid dialogue between second and third dimensions, motion and inertia, creation and ruin."

Catalina Ouyang is an American sculptor and installation artist who lives and works in New York City.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 “Diana Shpungin - Artist.” Diana Shpungin - Artist - MacDowell. MacDowell, 2012. https://www.macdowell.org/artists/diana-shpungin.
  2. “Residencies 2019.” 2019 - Art Omi. Art Omi, 2019. https://artomi.org/residencies/art/2019.
  3. 1 2 Kastner, Jeffrey. “Diana Shpungin.” Artforum, September 2011.
  4. “In Practice Fall '03.” – Exhibitions – SculptureCenter, 2003. https://www.sculpture-center.org/exhibitions/3067/in-practice-fall-03.
  5. 1 2 “The Art Assignment - Object Empathy.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, July 17, 2016. https://www.pbs.org/video/art-assignment-object-empathy
  6. 1 2 Garwood, Megan. “Diana Shpungin: Untitled (Portrait Of Dad).” Whitehot Magazine, 2011.
  7. 1 2 3 Coleman, Caryn. “Essay on a House.” Essay. In Drawing Of A House (Triptych), edited by Diana Shpungin, 6–10. Grand Rapids, MI: SiTE:Lab, 2016.
  8. Amenta, Paul. Foreward. In Drawing Of A House (Triptych), edited by Diana Shpungin, 2–5. Grand Rapids, MI: SiTE:LAB, 2016.
  9. “Commissions - Diana Shpungin - Drawing Of A House (Triptych).” Sculpture 35, no. 3, April 2016.
  10. Saltz, Jerry. “Critics Picks: End-Of-Life Counseling.” New York Magazine, June 13, 2011.
  11. Mycklebust, Scotto, and Website: Email: “Brooklyn Artist DIANA Shpungin at the MOCA, Museum of Contemporary ART Tucson.” Accessed February 7, 2021. http://art511mag.com/2019/12/30/the-museum-of-contemporary-art-tucson-presents-brooklyn-artist-diana-shpungins-bright-light-darkest-shadow/.
  12. Sculpture Park, Franconia. “Drawing For A Reliquary.” Franconia Sculpture Park, November 9, 2021. https://www.franconia.org/diana-shpungin-and-paul-amenta/.
  13. Migan, D., & Charmichael, G. (2022). To Make Bare The Shadow: On Diana Shpungin's Always Begin At The End. In D. Shpungin (Ed.), Always Begin At The End (pp. 10–15). essay, Smack Mellon.
  14. Steinberg, Rachel Vera. “Diana Shpungin, Always Begin At The End.” Smack Mellon, January 26, 2022. https://www.smackmellon.org/exhibition/diana-shpungin-always-begin-at-the-end/.
  15. Saltz, Jerry. Introduction. In Seeing out Louder: Art Criticism, 2003-2009. Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2009.

Further reading