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Some commentators have argued that, by hand rendering complex systems, Cooper re-humanizes them, both mitigating their oppressive impersonality and exposing their fragility, and thus the vulnerability of those who depend on them. This is a valid though somewhat reductive interpretation as it detracts from the inner logic of drawing. A more compelling way to view the relationship of the handmade and the systemic that incorporates the seismographic aspect of the artist’s hand is to think of the doodling, sifting, categorizing artist as a cog within a bigger machine, a cell within a pulsating organism, a spider in her web.

-Mappa Mundi: Diana Cooper at the Studio School, David Cohen, artcritical, 2018
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With Diana Cooper’s drawings and installations it makes more sense to speak of the construction of a visual language, rather than of abstraction. For her, language is not only oral, it is always present around us. She finds it is all the structures she mixes together: a ziggurat structure with an interior suggesting the blood system, a butterfly, and an abstract drawn form. The real is perceived as a source of different open possibilities but also as a repertoire of forms. The experience of perception takes the form of associations and telescoping of different systems that, due to the line’s trace, are organized into systems having a clear syntax defined by its rhythm and the connections it makes between different elements. The strangeness, impact, and sensuality of this work comes no doubt from connections and associations like these.

-Marion Daniel, “Systems that Make No Sense,” ROVEN, 2010
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This quirky, fiercely determined maker of “hybridized constructions,” as the artist refers to them, combines drawing, painting and sculpture into distinctively architectonic installations. Cooper’s approach to material, form and content originated with her incessant habit of doodling and an obsessive urge to multiply and repeat forms. She wants both to create chaos and to control it, in what amounts to a drawn-out act of sensuality, only partly sublimated, that is also one of cognition. Essentially three-dimensional drawings, these works suggest systems and circuits of all kinds–from the biological to the mechanical to the social, political and economic–that have been abstracted and schematized, but are based on real sources and real configurations of data.

…Cooper, with her absurdist playfulness and Orwellian intimations, appropriates for herself–and her hybridized, metamorphous creations–a unique place in contemporary abstraction.

-Lilly Wei, “Line Analysis,” Art in America, April, 2008
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Diana Cooper’s work looks like a lot of things—maps, flowcharts, circuit boards, diagrams, architectural renderings, and machine schematics are all commonly invoked comparisons. You could also add to that list fetish gear, mold, a candy store, and a view of the street through the windows of a car in the rain and still be within poetic license. The first list, though, has as a common denominator a series of systems for understanding something larger. If doodling reveals the mind’s rhythms that are a part of every thought, but not particular to any, abstraction can let us think about specific colors and forms in a way that piggybacks on their known uses, but is not tethered to them.

-Colleen Asper, “Feature: Diana Cooper,” Beautiful/Decay, Issue W, 2008
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daphne

Daphne, 2006

PRESS DOWNLOADS

Susan Yelavich, “Spatial Entanglements,” Assaying, Sept, 2019

David Cohen, “Mappa Mundi, Diana Cooper at the Studio School,” artcritical, April 2018

“Diana Cooper,” Wall Street International, April 2018

“We Eat Diana Cooper,” We Eat Art, September, 2016

Barbara Pollack, “Diana Cooper: My Eye Travels,” Time Out, Jan, 2013

Jerry Saltz, “Critics Picks,” New York Magazine, Jan, 2013

Barbara MacAdam, “Pink and Red and NASCAR too,” ARTnews, December, 2012

Marion Daniel, “Systems That Make No Sense,” ROVEN, 2010
Downlaod the english translation here.

Lilly Wei, “Diana Cooper,” The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, Number 116, Fall 2009

Lauren Braun, “Spotlight on…. Diana Cooper,” Paper Tiger, April 2009

Eve Kahn, “Extreme Art,” Art+Auction, September 2008

Lilly Wei, “Line Analysis,” Art in America, April 2008

Colleen Asper, “Feature: Diana Cooper,” Beautiful/Decay, Issue W 2008

“Highlights: Overdrive,” The Architect’s Newspaper, Issue 5 06, March 2008

David Carrier, “Diana Cooper,” Review, Artforum, February 2008

Douglas Max Utter, “Diana Cooper,“ Review, Art Papers, January/February 2008

“Highlights: Constructed Abstractions,” The Architect’s Newspaper, Diary Issue 18_06, January 2008

Marisa Kula, “Diana Cooper – Profile,” Surface Magazine # 54, Summer, 2005

Lori Waxman, “Critic’s Picks: Diana Cooper”, Artforum.com, March 2005

Roger White, “Diana Cooper”, The Brooklyn Rail, April, 2005

Merrily Kerr, “Diana Cooper”, Time Out, March 31- April 6th 2005 

Christotopher Knight, “Random acts as part of the plan – Diana Cooper, ” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2005

Shirley Kaneda and Saul Ostrow, “Artist’s Choice: Diana Cooper, ” BOMB, Spring, 2003

Morgan Falconer, “Diana Cooper: Parapaint with Pom-Poms,” ArtReview(UK), December/January, 2002 

Julie Caniglia, Artforum International, Vol. 41, December 2002

Nancy Princenthal, “Diana Cooper,” Art in America, November, 2002

Rachel Urkowitz, “Diana Cooper,” Artext, February-April 2000

David Gleeson, “Diana Cooper,” Time Out (UK), November 15-22, 2000

Meghan Dailey, “Diana Cooper,” Review, Art Forum, December, 1999

Tim Griffin, “Diana Cooper,” Time Out, September 30-October 7, 1999

Roberta Smith, “Diana Cooper,” Review, The New York Times, September 17, 1999

Tim Griffin, Art in America, “Diana Cooper,” November, 1998

Ken Johnson, “Diana Cooper,” Review, The New York Times, March 13, 1998

Peter Schjeldahl, “Thanks for Painting,” The Village Voice, March 17, 1998

Roberta Smith, “Diana Cooper,” Review, The New York Times , February 14, 1997