Diane Christiansen

Diane Christiansen

b. 1958
, Grinnell, IA
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Diane Christiansen received a B.A. from Grinnell College in 1981, an M.S.W. from Loyola University, and her M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, both in 1990. Her paintings, drawings, animations, and large-scale collaborative installations, have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe at RULE Gallery, Denver, CO and Marfa, TX; Kasia Kay Art Projects, Chicago, IL; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Herron Galleries, Indianapolis, IN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Elmhurst Art Museum, and the Armory in Pasadena among others.

Christiansen’s practice has three interactive branches, each feeding and informing the others. She paints and draws daily and records images for animations. The resulting stop-motion footage, generated in drawings or paintings on plaster, with its erasures and revisions revealed in the completed digital medium, is a meditative ritual through which she acknowledges life’s essential impermanence and its durable illusion of solidity.

In the artist’s worldview, all phenomena are alive. The seemingly static or abstract is in relationship with what is perceived as sentient. Prehistoric cave paintings, Betty Boop cartoons, and cracks in the sidewalk all prove that magic is everywhere. Diane Christiansen intends not to waste a minute of this precious life.