Diana Shpungin
Spring 2025 Cycle – Art
Brooklyn, NY dianashpungin.com
Always Begin At The End (installation view)
Year Created: 2022
Media: hand-applied graphite pencil, mixed media,
marble
Dimensions: 40 x 20 x 30 feet
Description: Solo Exhibition at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn
This exhibition features many objects made from cast paper,
alongside combined found objects that the artist alters.
Much of Shpungin’s works can be seen as “drawings” in the
sense that they are literally covered in drawing’s most
ubiquitous medium: graphite pencil. This material marks,
delineates, coats, and covers the surfaces and crevices of
her objects, transforming them into solid shadows. Shpungin
painstakingly covers each object but does not obscure it, in
a process that both masks and gives depth. Her works are
led by a heartstrong conceptualism based on personal and
collective memories and formed through careful intersections
of familiar objects and materials.
Poem: A Damn Haze To Obey (installation view)
Year Created: 2022
Media: hand-applied graphite pencil on cardboard, with mixed media, packaging materials, and roof paper
Dimensions: 15 x 24 x 1 feet
Description: A large assortment of collected boxes are hand coated in graphite pencil and placed in an organized grid like formation on a base of roof tar paper, with selected other materials and packaging material. The boxes were collected over several weeks from materials used to produce the exhibition. Mostly from three corporations, Amazon, Home Depot and eBay. The title, Poem: A Damn Haze To Obey, is an anagram the artist came up with from the names of these corporations and refers to our often forced or unintended commerce dependency.
Solo Exhibition at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn,
Perhaps Not The Model Sentiment Of Devotion (installation
view)
Year Created: 2022
Media: handmade paper on aluminum blinds, quartz
Dimensions: 140 x 50 x 72 inches
Description: handmade and hand-applied abaca paper
A set of aluminum blinds are meticulously veneered by hand
in a custom graphite abaca paper. The blinds are disheveled
and hang onto the floor, holding a variety of large hand
polished quartz crystals, suspended as if they’ve plummeted
through the window. The crystals’ supposed calming and
romantic qualities further complicate the fraught relationship
between the natural and the manufactured objects as well as
the implied relationship between the thrower and the target.
Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY
Drawing Of A House (Triptych) (installation view daylight/nightfall)
Year Created: 2015
Media: house, graphite pencil
Dimensions: dimensions variable
Description: hand-applied graphite pencil on 2-story
house and nine channel hand drawn pencil animation.
It starts with a pencil, a fundamental tool universal in its
function and familiarity.Diana Shpungin’s Drawing Of A
House (Triptych) is a large scale, multi-faceted, participatory
work functioning as one over all monumental installation and
community project for SiTE:LAB in partnership with Habitat
for Humanity of Kent County and The City of Grand Rapids.
The vacant house is converted into a massive sculpture and
three-dimensional drawing by way of it being entirely
tediously encased by hand in graphite pencil.
To Extinguish The Sun
Year Created: 2020
Media: hand-drawn pencil animation, projection on drawing paper
Dimensions: 4 minutes 25 second, continuous loop, dimensions variable, edition of 3
Description: To Extinguish The Sun depicts an abstracted celestial sky scape that fluctuates through numerous environmental changes. The many drawings were exposed to light, water, fire, puncturing and generalized destruction creating a flickering jump shot effect. The accompanying otherworldly soundtrack is of wind blowing on the planet Mars. It is the very first sound recorded on Mars by NASA in November 2019.
In Through The Out (Diptych)
Year Created: 2022
Media: graphite pencil, handmade paper, stones
Dimensions: 32 x 86 x 80 inches
Description: cast handmade paper drawn with graphite
pencil. Two paper cast doors, with detailed wood grain graphite
pencil drawings, are placed precariously in a mirrored
configuration on a pile of marble rocks, reflecting
positive/negative space, as if one fell away from the other. A
moment is implied, denoting a drastic change, a point of no
return, a crossing of a threshold.
A Light From Below (installation view)
Year Created: 2018
Media: graphite pencil, handmade paper, silver &
graphite
Dimensions: 37 x 49 x 144 inches
Description: handmade paper & hand-drawn shadow
Creating a customized “graphite” paper from abaca, gray
and silver luminous pigment, Shpungin experimented with
papier-mâché applications on domestic objects. A Light
From Below depicts a papier-mâché fallen chandelier still
anchored to the ceiling by a linear chain with the addition of
white cotton paper atop a low pedestal with a graphite pencil
drawing of the chandelier’s shadow.
Dieu Donne, New York
To Abate Empty Offerings (Still Life 1)
Year Created: 2022
Media: graphite pencil on still life objects and fencing
Dimensions: 6 x 12 x 1 feet
Description: hand-applied graphite pencil
A section of chain link fencing is hand-coated in graphite and
laid across the floor. The fence holds an abundance of fake
fruit cast from plastic and coated in graphite. Graphite and
abaca covered tree limbs weave through the looping metal
and a graphite-coated cast human skull sits among the
bounty.
Title: Bright Light/Darkest Shadow - installation view
Date of Work: 2020
Size: variable - as shown 40 x 10 x 30 feet
Material: hand-drawn pencil animations
Synopsis: Diana Shpungin’s body of work re-imagines standard notions of drawing practice through painstakingly made handdrawn animation. For her solo exhibition Bright Light / Darkest Shadow the artist displays hand-drawn animation works consisting of literally thousands of original source drawings shown in three distinct gallery spaces of the museum. The works on exhibition consider numerous dichotomies, –both literally and figuratively, between light/darkness, hope/despair, failure/triumph, memory/forgetfulness, nature/humanity, breakage/repair, loss/longing, public/private and the tangible/metaphysical as components reliant on one another, and in an optimistic quest for empathy across identity lines in the face of uncertainty in our current precarious times.
Drawing For A Reliquary (installation view)
Year Created: 2021
Media: steel, trees, graphite pencil, silver, boulders
Dimensions: 50 x 60 x 14 feet
Description: hand-applied graphite pencil on found
materials
Drawing For A Reliquary is both a drawing, a sculpture, and
a large-scale mixed-media installation comprised of various
salvaged components and two fabricated steel truss
structures, with the entirety of all their surfaces painstakingly
hand-drawn in graphite pencil. By way of this process the
sculpture becomes a ghostly remnant, both an ode to
historical minimalist metal sculpture and a ceremonial
environment occupying the natural setting.
Franconia Sculpture Park, Minneapolis
Artist Statement Biography
Diana Shpungin is a Brooklyn based, Latvian-born American multi-disciplinary artist who has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in both national and international venues, including: Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Children’s Museum of Art, New York, NY; Invisible Exports, New York, NY; Marc Straus Gallery, New York, NY; New Discretions, New York, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Franconia Sculpture Park, Minneapolis, MN; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids, MI; Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France; Fieldgate Gallery, London, England; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic; Galerie Zurcher, Paris, France; Salaam Art Temple, Baku, Azerbaijan; and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, in addition to being included in numerous public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Shpungin was awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (2017), The Harpo Foundation Grant (2024), and several grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2015, 2022, 2025). She is also the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Art Omi, Bau Institute at Camargo Foundation, CEC Artslink, Dieu Donne, La Maison Dora Maar, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell Residency, and Yaddo.Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Time Out London, among others. Shpungin and is currently a part-time Associate Professor at Parsons: The New School in New York City. Diana Shpungin’s artistic practice is dedicated to challenging ideas of drawing through sculptural and time-based forms. Her works are led by a heart-strong conceptualism, involving obsessive processes while exploring themes of memory, failure, loss, and repair, –employing optimism in a quest for empathy across identity lines. The use of graphite pencil, both permanent and denoting erasure, is the foundation of the work. While an obsessive language of materials/techniques has been gleaned based on Shpungin’s late surgeon immigrant fathers frugal methods in medicine/domestic life. The sculptural works function as drawings in space, meticulously coating objects with graphite pencil as if they removed themselves from the picture plane and into bodily space. Concerned with beauty as a sublime idea rather than as a straightforward formal element, the sentimental both seduces and repels. However, that duality has become a necessary element in the work, always looking for a balance between form and content, superstition and logic, light and darkness, science and the sentimental, public and private, personal and political, and the poetic and the rational.
Diana Shpungin is a Brooklyn based, Latvian-born American multi-disciplinary artist who has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in both national and international venues, including: Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Children’s Museum of Art, New York, NY; Invisible Exports, New York, NY; Marc Straus Gallery, New York, NY; New Discretions, New York, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Franconia Sculpture Park, Minneapolis, MN; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids, MI; Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France; Fieldgate Gallery, London, England; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic; Galerie Zurcher, Paris, France; Salaam Art Temple, Baku, Azerbaijan; and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, in addition to being included in numerous public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Shpungin was awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (2017), The Harpo Foundation Grant (2024), and several grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2015, 2022, 2025). She is also the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Art Omi, Bau Institute at Camargo Foundation, CEC Artslink, Dieu Donne, La Maison Dora Maar, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell Residency, and Yaddo.Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Time Out London, among others. Shpungin and is currently a part-time Associate Professor at Parsons: The New School in New York City. Diana Shpungin’s artistic practice is dedicated to challenging ideas of drawing through sculptural and time-based forms. Her works are led by a heart-strong conceptualism, involving obsessive processes while exploring themes of memory, failure, loss, and repair, –employing optimism in a quest for empathy across identity lines. The use of graphite pencil, both permanent and denoting erasure, is the foundation of the work. While an obsessive language of materials/techniques has been gleaned based on Shpungin’s late surgeon immigrant fathers frugal methods in medicine/domestic life. The sculptural works function as drawings in space, meticulously coating objects with graphite pencil as if they removed themselves from the picture plane and into bodily space. Concerned with beauty as a sublime idea rather than as a straightforward formal element, the sentimental both seduces and repels. However, that duality has become a necessary element in the work, always looking for a balance between form and content, superstition and logic, light and darkness, science and the sentimental, public and private, personal and political, and the poetic and the rational.
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