Dianna Molzan was born in 1972 in
Tacoma,
Washington. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 and also attended the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from the
University of Southern California, writing her senior thesis,
How the Frame was One, on the development both theoretical and symbolic framing devices within art, primarily focusing on two works:
Georges Seurat's
La Grande Jatte (1884) and
Eva Hesse's
Hang Up (1966). Her first solo exhibition was at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, in 2009. Molzan's solo exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art titled "Bologna Meissen" in 2011 was her first solo museum exhibition and debut in
New York. According to the Whitney Museum, Molzan "uses a variety of material approaches that differ from one work to the next, each painting exhibits a subtle precision in its intention and execution. Although she works with traditional materials, such as oil on linen, she approaches her canvases irreverently, invoking elements of fashion, the decorative arts, ceramics, and popular design." Molzan chose the title for "Bologna Meissen" because of "two cities that are the origins of two of [Molzan's] biggest influences—
Bologna, Italy, for the painter
Giorgio Morandi and
Meissen, Germany, for Meissen porcelain ware." In conversation with curator
Margot Norton of the Whitney Museum, Molzan states, " I limit myself to traditional painting materials because I want to show that it isn’t the materials that have changed over the centuries, but the thinking about the materials and the philosophy behind their application. Oil paint and linen and the wooden support are all inherited materials that date back to the
Renaissance and continue through modernism and all the other styles of painting that are radically different from one another but use the same stuff. I love that I can paint-splatter a canvas and make it look like hard plastic by using more or less the same materials
Rousseau used to depict the forest of
Fontainebleau in the nineteenth century." ==References==