DRAWING ON MEMORY / Lecture by Diana Shpungin
Date: 21 May
Time: 14:00
Venue: Azerbaijan University of Architecture and Construction
Private Event
In Drawing On Memory, artist Diana Shpungin presents an overview of her most pivotal projects, offering insights into a practice that blends personal narrative with conceptual rigor. Known for her unique use of graphite drawing applied to sculptural forms, Shpungin creates emotionally charged works that explore themes such as memory, loss, empathy, and repair. Her multidisciplinary approach spanning drawing, installation, animation, and performance challenges traditional boundaries between mediums and invites viewers into intimate, often haunting visual worlds.
During this lecture, Shpungin will reflect on the evolution of her artistic voice, sharing behind the scenes processes, influences, and the deeply personal motivations behind her work. From large-scale public installations to hand-drawn animations, she reveals how materiality and memory intertwine in her art, and how acts of care and labor can become powerful forms of resistance and remembrance.
Diana Shpungin
Diana Shpungin is a Latvian-born American multidisciplinary artist. She is known for her work in drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, video, sound, and hand-drawn pencil animation. Her work explores non-traditional ideas of drawing through sculptural and time-based processes.
Diana Shpungin was born in Riga, Latvia under Soviet rule. As a child she emigrated with her family to the United States, where they settled in New York City. Shpungin earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and has taught and lectured at multiple institutions. She is currently an associate professor at Parsons School of Design.
Shpungin’s work often deals with themes of memory, longing, loss, and empathy. Influenced by artists like Felix Gonzales-Torres, Shpungin uses deeply personal motifs and narratives in her drawings, sculptures, and video works, often combined with found objects to emphasize a concept that she refers to as “object empathy”. In her smaller sculptures and larger installations, Shpungin explores objects and architecture to emphasize contrasting themes such as domestic and communal, light and dark, or interior and exterior.
Diana Shpungin 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; 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; and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.
Shpungin was awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2019/2020), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (2017), and several grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2015, 2020, 2022). She is also the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Art Omi, Bau Institute at Camargo Foundation, Bronx Museum AIM Program, CEC Artslink, Dieu Donne,La Maison Dora Maar, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell, and Yaddo.