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.
Read MoreBorn 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.
She recently received a 2011 Award for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles, and other notable awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a Phelan Award in Film and Video.
Source: David Zwirner
In 2015, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host a mid-career survey of Thater's work.
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).
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.
