Since the early 1990s, Diana Thater has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works. Her primary emphasis is on the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between tamed and wild, and science and magic. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative and sometimes near-abstract works interact with their surroundings to create an intricate relationship between time-based and spatial dimensions. She frequently transforms the exhibition venue into a hybrid space between sculpture and architecture, using color and light alongside her installations.
Born in 1962 in San Francisco, Thater studied Art History at New York University, before receiving her M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Since 1993, her work has been represented by David Zwirner. In 2010, the gallery presented Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic, which premiered earlier that year at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California. In 2012, Chernobyl marked her seventh solo show at the gallery. A solo presentation of new work by the artist is planned for the gallery’s booth at The Armory Show in New York to be held March 7-10, 2013.
Over the past decade, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions, including the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Natural History Museum, London (both 2009); Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (both 2004); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); and the Secession, Vienna (2000).
She recently received a 2011 Award for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles, and other notable awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Phelan Award in Film and Video.
Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Also a prolific writer, educator, and curator, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles.
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