Collection: DIANA ZWIBACH

About Diana Zwibach

Diana Zwibach spent her early childhood in Novi Sad Serbia where she was born in 1948. In 1971 she was awarded a national art scholarship to further her studies in London.

In 1972 she received a post graduate diploma in Printmaking at Chelsea School of Art and a MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art in 1974. Since 1975 she has lived and worked as a professional artist in the North of England, exhibiting worldwide.  Her work has been exhibited in twenty-two solo exhibitions and many more collaborative exhibitions.

Zwibach’s work is mainly figurative, anthropomorphic and organic, and generally deals with the human condition within its socio-political, topographical and geographical perspective.

Her works are distinguished by their complex and dramatic narratives which take both real and imagined stories as their source material. Zwibach develops the narratives through an organic approach to painting and printmaking the figures change fluidly to form an exciting and explosive colourful crescendo.

The figures and the meaning formulate and disintegrate, creating their own symmetry and symbolism. The very nature of creation and destruction exists under the layers of texture proposing both the mental and physical with expressions of connectedness and disjunction. The method is an autobiographical approach incorporating personal experiences of natural surroundings, regional and personal dialects. 

Robert McDowell quote :-“Every quality of paint or line whether a soft exuberance or a sharp stabbing energy are meant to be just so. There are no superfluous or merely decorative elements; absolutely no painting by numbers just to fill in or load up the space. The paintings and drawings can at first look appear in places to have accidental half-finished marks and textures, like unfinished thoughts or incomplete sentences, but every detail is considered and weighted, nothing left in for no reason or without emotion; these are truly professional works in which years of art training and practice, in which one learns to care for every little detail, have not displaced or lost the creative subjectivity of the child, but only enhanced and freed this – what Picasso claimed his whole life’s work was dedicated to achieving. Of all the artists whose work continues to inspire Diana, Picasso is probably the strongest. What is also remarkable in this respect is that Diana’s painting and drawing and printmaking has enjoyed its full-fledged power from the earliest years. I have looked at hundreds of her paintings and drawings and find there is, since art college days, the same constancy of complete integrity of emotional judgment in all her works throughout her career.

Diana’s drawings (charcoal), often much larger in scale than her paintings, have a strong raking energies that use a much deeper pictorial space and find a kinetic dynamism or automatism forms of abstract expression to deliver searing emotions that possess her female figures or occupy their space. These are portraits and yet not portraits. They are inspired by various versions of herself at different times in her life and of others close to her. Life’s realities she finds most compelling and most real when expressed in human figures; people are entirely central to her life and through which she sees the world. This may be more typically a female than a male view, but surely one we can all agree with.”