Statement and Bio
My interest in Abstract Expressionism began when I studied with Jackson Pollack's teacher Stanley William Hayter in 1984. You can read more about his exercise in automatism here. I met the German Expressionist art collectors Marcia and Granville Specks in 1992 and was immediately drawn to the graphic power of their print collection. Over more than two decades I studied the prints of Eric Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Max Beckman, and Kathe Kollwitz, and many others. I became fascinated with their painterly print techniques and have been eager to invent my own ever since.
The these prints helped me find my own voice expressing the upheaval and uncertainty of the present. The tragic aspect of my work attempts to distill states that are primary and elemental. There are always turbulent opposing tensions: life and death, lyricism and tragedy, abstraction and figure. Whether through emotional anguish or energetic immediacy I strive to reveal outward states of inward feeling.
Diane Thodos was a Pollock Krasner Grant recipiant in 2002. She has solo exhibits at Kouros Gallery in New York, Paule Friedland and Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, among many others is represented by the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. She has also studied with the New York art critic Donald Kuspit from 1987 to 1992 and focused much critical writing on Chicago art history and Expressionism with articles appearing in New Art Examiner, Sculpture Magazine, Art on Paper, Dialogue Magazine and the Chicago Artist’s Coalition News among others. Her work has been collected by the Milwaukee Art Museum, The National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, The Block Museum at Northwestern University , the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie IL, the Koehnline Museum in Des Planes IL, and the Strake Jesuit Museum in Houston, Texas among many others.