1301PE is pleased to announce the second part of a major exhibition by acclaimed Los Angeles artist Diana Thater. The artist has made two exhibitions for the gallery; separated by five months, the two works are conceived of as paired installations. Exhibited in October/November 2004, her autumn installation was titled White is the Color. This spring installation is titled Pink Daisies, Amber Room.
Thater has received international acclaim for her large-scale, color-saturated projections and monitor installations. Her profound influence on the form of installation can be seen in the work of young artists in galleries and museums around the world.
The natural world has been a recurring motif in Thater's oeuvre since the early 1990's. Her work brings the outdoors in and addresses the relationship between modern technology and notions of beauty and the sublime. In White is the Color, Thater's vision of clouds of smoke from the 2001 California wildfires functions as a 21st Century interpretation of the sublime, addressing the terror of nature not as something which may consume us, but as something which we are rapidly consuming. For Thater, nature's sublime terror is that it is dying before our eyes. In Pink Daisies, Amber Room, the notion of beauty is addressed as oversized daisies move in and around the amber-lit gallery space. As with all of her work, the artist takes every aspect of context and "place" into consideration and exposes all technology and hardware to the visitor. Inside her installation, Thater's concern with the present - the here and now of the artwork"is made manifest.
Diana Thater was born in 1962 in San Francisco. She works and lives in Los Angeles. Her recent solo museum exhibitions include a dual museum survey at the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Museum of Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany. She has also had solo exhibitions at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Vienna Secession, Vienna, The MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Broken Circle, her contribution to the 1997 Munster Sculpture Project is permanently on view at the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, Germany. Delphine is currently exhibited at the Hamberger Bahnhof in Berlin as part of the Filck Collection.
Thater has a number of publications which are available at the gallery: Her Survey Catalog, published in 2004 and titled Beauty has Depth. History has Meaning. Screw the Market. Keep the Faith; The Dia Catalog titled Knots & Surfaces; as well as the Haunch of Venison catalog, Transcendence is expansion and contraction at the same time; and her most recent book, Dreamland, produced with Zwirner & Wirth, New York.
