Diana Thater

Drawings: 1999–2006

21 June – 15 August, 2025

Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco, USA) has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works since the early 1990s. She makes video installations that poetically grapple with threats to the natural world, from the extinction of species to long-lasting environmental disasters such as the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl. Many of the artist’s works take the space where people and animals meet as their subject, exploring the experiences of wild gorillas in a Cameroon park, a wolf trained to work in Hollywood films, a monkey-inhabited temple in India, zebras at an exotic animal farm, and dolphins in the Caribbean. Thater also provides a window onto animal subjectivity through her use of atypical camera angles, dramatic shifts in scale, and colored lights that alter the spectrum of her exhibitions. Adopting cyclical time signatures and extended durations, Thater’s ambient works are abstractions of time which diverge from the linear narratives humans use to make sense of themselves and the cosmos. Whether using floor-to-ceiling video projections, stacks of television monitors, or screens placed flat on the ground, Thater’s installations are site-dependent and subtly change from venue to venue.

Institutional collections of Thater’s works include The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pinault Collection, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Tate, United Kingdom; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among many others.

Diana Thater lives and works in Los Angeles. She has shown with 1301PE since 1993.