Diana Shpungin’s work challenges ideas of the drawn versus sculptural form. Shpungin navigates memory, failure, longing and loss in a quest for empathy across identity lines in both public and private space. Denoting recollection and forgetfulness, mark making and erasure, the sculpture functions as drawing in three-dimensional space, coating objects with graphite pencil as if they removed themselves from the two-dimensional plane and into our bodily space, providing greater physicality. 
Shpungin has been exhibited extensively in solo/group exhibitions in both
national/international venues including: Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Sculpture Center, NY; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague; Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; Carrousel du Louvre, Paris; Invisible Exports, NY; Marc Straus, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Galerie Zurcher, Paris; and Site:Lab, Grand Rapids, MI. Shpungin’s work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ in 2020. Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Flash Art, New York Magazine, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Timeout London, among others. An extensive hardcover book was published in 2016 documenting Shpungin’s monumental project, Drawing Of A House (Triptych). Shpungin was awarded the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture and has previously been the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies from Foundation of Contemporary Art, MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, CEC Artslink, Art Omi, Dieu Donne and Bronx Museum AIM Program. Born in Latvia’s seaside capital of Riga under Soviet rule, Shpungin immigrated as a child settling in New York City. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY and is currently an Assistant Professor at Parsons: The New School for Design in New York City.