NEW YORK, NY.- kaufmann repetto is presenting Dianna Molzan’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Bio Casino. The exhibition draws on the fundamental desire for humans to create, tinker, and transform. As a species, our innovations brought about by this intrinsic trait have subsequently impact the natural world and our ever-shifting way of life.

Molzan’s works subtly reference historic inventions that have shaped our modern surroundings. Through formal qualities such as pattern, color, and material, Molzan’s works take inspiration from patchworked agricultural fields, ancient systems of water distribution like fountains and pipes, and the transfiguration of raw materials into technological objects such as glass beads. Looking to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained glass lamps, which utilized early electric light bulbs that made the floral designs glow, to the radiating gradient of Utagawa Hiroshige’s colorful landscape prints, which were made possible by new print technologies and mass production, Molzan is interested in the interplay of industrialization as they relate to the natural world and our human impulses to innovate and create.

In a world of predictive markets, artificial intelligence, conspiracy theories, and algorithms, Bio Casino reflects the long history of human invention and its myriad outcomes and consequences. The works explore the binding power of the gravitational pull that orders our universe. Gravity, a force immune to human activity, plays a large role in all the paintings in both content and form. Molzan’s artworks and the viewer are bound together by the same rules of nature. Unraveled canvases rely on their gravitational weight to keep the threads in line. Their physical and tactile properties work in tandem with illusionary painted space. Each work appears perfect, yet, crucially, they are handmade. Painted lines and bands that hang outside of the pictorial confines cast real shadows alongside painted ones, further conflating the mix of the actual and imagined world. Elementary linear forms reoccur throughout Molzan’s work; these trompe-l'oeil compositions challenge perception— the narrow strip motif found across many of the works acts as a kind of empty vessel, they can present as binary forms, falling rain, hanging vegetation, standing human figures, graph data, architecture and so on.

Dianna Molzan (b. 1972, Tacoma) lives and works in Los Angeles. Molzan’s work has been exhibited internationally in museum exhibitions at ICA Boston (2019, 2012); MoMA, New York (2014); SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2016); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2011), among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA Boston, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; University of Chicago, Chicago; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), among others.