Diana Shpungin

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Diana Shpungin
Born
Riga, Latvia
NationalityAmerican
EducationSchool of Visual Arts (MFA)
Known forSculpture, drawing, installation, hand-drawn pencil animation
Notable work
"Drawing Of A House (Triptych)" (2016)
MovementContemporary Art
Spouse(s)Blane De St. Croix

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

Early life and education[]

Diana Shpungin was born in Riga, Latvia under Soviet rule. As a child she immigrated 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 with artist Nicole Englemann 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)"

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 work[]

"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 an 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

"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

Art critic Jerry Saltz said of Shpungin's work:

“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

Exhibitions and press[]

Shpungin has exhibited extensively in both national and international venues including: The Bronx Museum of Art in Bronx, NY; the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY; the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, FL; 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; and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT.

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 a recent episode of PBS’s Art Assignment, “Object Empathy”[5] and was cited in the introduction of Jerry Saltz’s recent book "Seeing Out Louder".[12]

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 The MacDowell Colony, 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]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d “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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b “The Art Assignment - Object Empathy.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, July 17, 2016. https://www.pbs.org/video/art-assignment-object-empathy
  6. ^ a b Garwood, Megan. “Diana Shpungin: Untitled (Portrait Of Dad).” Whitehot Magazine, 2011.
  7. ^ a b c 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. ^ Saltz, Jerry. Introduction. In Seeing out Louder: Art Criticism, 2003-2009. Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2009.

Further reading[]

  • Saltz, Jerry. Seeing out Louder: Art Criticism, 2003-2009. Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2009.
  • Diana Shpungin. Drawing Of A House (Triptych). Grand Rapids, MI: SiTE:LAB, 2016.

External links[]

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