Diane Sophrin has, over the past twenty years, divided her time between Vermont and Budapest. She maintains studios in both places, continuing to work intensively in the quiet of her Montpelier studio while pursuing an active involvement in the Budapest art world, exhibiting in solo and group shows on an ongoing basis. She has been an active member of the Hungarian Painters’ Association for over a decade, and several years ago was admitted to the FÉSZEK Artists’ Club, an historically significant visual and performing arts organization founded in Budapest nearly a century ago. Most recently, she has become a member of The Front Gallery in Montpelier.
Working within this wide context, her works traverse boundaries of media, developing a personal visual language with which to comment, define and respond to world events and realities.
Moving from decades of dedicated figural, narrative painting and drawing from life, her work began a gradual shift towards abstraction that accelerated in 2000 during her first year in Hungary. An idiosyncratic abstract idiom emerged and symbols of personal significance evolved, drawn partly from forms absorbed during the earlier years of intense visual scrutiny.
Process as subject has taken on significant importance in Sophrin’s work as the construct of series acts as documentation of visual and thematic analysis. The medium itself expresses its own reality, while the work simultaneously presents itself as object (sheaf, scroll, totem, book, relic, etc.).
The dualities of Sophrin’s creative life have brought her work to a vital edge – crossing borders as needed, describing and defining an internal landscape while simultaneously reflecting inescapable external realities.
SOPHRIN DIANE – MŰVÉSZETI ÖNÉLETRAJZ (Magyarul)
Diane Sophrin 