Diane Pfister is an American artist and art lecturer whose work was first recognized in London, England, and other territories of the United Kingdom. Her early work includes collage, impressionism and abstract expressionism but is now primarily abstract oils, incorporating techniques drawn from microphotography, map coordinates and satellite surveillance to merge abstraction with 21st-century realism.
Working principally in oils, her series include "Toys" ; "Scars" ; "Abstract Locations" ; and "End Papers". The latter were the subject of a successful 2006 exhibition at the Duncan Campbell Gallery in London. Pfister's paintings have also been acquired by private and corporate collections in the United States, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
Return to the U.S.
Pfister returned with her family to the United States in 2006, and now lives in Cincinnati, where she maintains a studio at the Pendleton Art Center. Since relocating with her family to her native country in 2006, Pfister has mounted the exhibition "Painting is Soundless Poetry" at the Good News Gallery in Woodbury, Connecticut. Here she unveiled two more series, "Source Energy" and a series of "Kimono" triptychs, which interested Pfister for the "independent picture plane a kimono creates on the human body." In notes provided to the exhibit, she continued "The East found it more important to ignore the surface of the body, while the West obsessed with the figure. It is the difference between the diaphanous, transcendental and intellectual, versus the worldly and secular. It is my hope that viewing these works may trigger in others the sense of floating in that space."
Critical recognition
Writing about Pfister's work, David Buckman noted that some artists pursue "a narrow course, hardly deviating from it over a lifetime's work. Pfister has chosen the far tougher route: constantly rethiniking how she can view the world around her. Her career experience and wide training in America and Britain have encouraged an unusual open-mindedness. Paintings as richly diverse as the Abstract Locations, plus all the rest of Pfister's exhibition, need no more explanatory words to justify their merits as compelling images."
Screenwriting
In 2009, Pfister coauthored The Weight of Salt and Soul with Tim Lucas, an original screenplay based on the life of Ishi, a Native American who was the last of his tribe and acclimated to the white man's world during the early twentieth century.
Exhibitions
Thornbury Castle, Thornbury, Glos ; Collyer Bristow Gallery, London ; Chelsea & Westiminster Hospital, London ; Ashursts Gallery, London ; Westbourne Studios, London ; Duncan Campbell Gallery, London ; The Felix, Cambridge ; Good News Gallery, Woodbury, Connecticut.