NEW YORK. N.Y.- The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Dianna Molzan: Bologna Meissen, the first solo museum exhibition devoted to the artist’s work. This lobby gallery show, open today, is curated by Whitney curatorial assistant Margot Norton.

Dianna Molzan’s works engage in an open and unpredictable dialogue with the history of abstract painting. Although she works with traditional materials, such as oil on linen, she approaches her canvases irreverently, invoking elements of fashion, the decorative arts, ceramics, and popular design. In this installation the artist’s engaging and sophisticated works each reveal a highly distinctive character and play off one another in lively counterpoint.

The title Bologna Meissen, alludes to two of the artist’s longstanding interests: the twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who lived and worked in Bologna, rendering still lifes of vessels with poetic simplicity; and Meissen, the German porcelain manufacturer renowned for vivid colors, intricately embossed forms, and whimsical details. Molzan has observed that both painting and ceramics, at their essence, have an intrinsic identity that can be transformed with the intentional application of pigment and pattern.

With each work Molzan effects a transformation, as she rends, slices, unravels, sculpts, and adorns the canvas in a characteristically defining manner. While she uses a variety of material approaches that differ from one work to the next, each canvas exhibits a subtle precision in its intention and execution.

Dianna Molzan was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1972; she currently lives and works in Los Angeles. After attending the Universität der Künste Berlin in 2000, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern California in 2009. Molzan’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including All of this and nothing at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2011 and How Soon Now at the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami, in 2010. She had her first solo exhibition at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, in 2009. Bologna Meissen is Molzan’s first exhibition in New York.