Christa Diepenbrock

According to artist Robert Jessup, figurative paintings is currently seen as going against the trend of subject matter in contemporary art, but Christa Diepenbrock continues to buck this trend through her paintings of dancing figures. She uses fleshy colored paints to give her figures a sense of being nude. Her earthy tones mix well with her fleshy figures. Her images mix a form of futurism/cubism with the abstract language of West Coast Figurative artists. She works on large canvas (generally 42" by 72"), which references the heroic abstract artists but also gives the figures enough space to dance off the image. One might think that her images are just rehashing the Modernist agenda, and her style may seem to reflect this, however, a defining Modernist like Picasso would used African masks because of their otherness, but Diepenbrock references the Indian Dance and Flamenco Dance because of her experience with the subjects and not because the exotic subject matter. Diepenbrock’s work could be compared to the Algerian-born/London-based artist Houtiaa Niati who has made abstract figure paintings based off of Orientalist paintings. This sets Diepenbrock apart from the past and firmly in the Post-Modern issues of treating the image of the figure as a subject and not an object to be gazed at passively.
Christa Diepenbrock is an artist in Dallas that has shown at the now debunked Local Color Gallery when I was curator and published in Sojourn Journal of the Arts and Humanities when I was art editor. Her website is http://www.christadiepenbrock.com/index.html