Diana Shpungin is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist who works in drawing, sculpture, installation, hand-drawn animation, video, and sound. Born in Latvia’s seaside capital of Riga under Soviet rule, Shpungin immigrated as a child to the U.S. where her family settled in New York City. She received her M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Examining themes of memory, loss, and mortality, Shpungin's artwork employs a painstaking process while seeking empathy across identity lines. The use of graphite pencil as an elemental tool, both permanent and denoting erasure, is the foundation to her approach.
She has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in both national and international venues including: The Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France; Invisible Exports, New York, NY; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York, NY; Marc Straus Gallery, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; and Site:Lab, Grand Rapids, MI. Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, FlashArt, New York magazine, Art in America, The New York Times, Timeout London, and Le Monde among others. Her work was the subject of a recent episode of PBS’s Art Assignment, “Object Empathy” and was cited in the introduction of Jerry Saltz’s most recent book Seeing out Louder. Besides being a MacDowell fellow, Shpungin has been awarded residencies with The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, VLA Art and Law, Bronx Museum AIM Program, Guttenberg Arts, and Islip Carriage House.
