Biography of Diana Thater
The beautiful, immersive environments of Diana Thater make viewers aware of the space they occupy through the use of intense colors—emphasizing volume and turning space itself into an object to be meditated upon. Working predominantly with light, film, and video, Thater grounds her spectators in the present moment, almost like an extension of Barnett Newman’s large-scale paintings into three dimensional space, where color wholly envelops the viewer to transmit a feeling of the sublime.
Diana Thater's predilection for nature and the cosmos also becomes immediately clear on entering one of her installations which often incorporate beautiful footage of flora and fauna as well as views of the universe. Intent on bringing animal space into human space, the artist complicates the viewer's space with the natural habitat of bees, dolphins, or even gorillas and presents these creatures as subjects with which one engages and not just observes. She currently holds the Artist-in-Residence position for The Dolphin Project, Miami FL.
Born in San Francisco in 1962, Diana Thater now lives and works in Los Angeles. She has had solo shows at many renowned museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Basel, and a travelling exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2014/2015. She received a fellowship from the Simon R. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York in 2005 and her work is in museum collections worldwide, notably the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York, and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.