GLOBAL COLLECTORS ART PRIZE | MASTERS DEFINING THE FUTURE OF ART

Biography

Diane Mazur is a San Antonio, Texas-based abstract expressionist painter whose multi-decadal practice spans painting, drawing, mixed media, ceramic sculpture, wood constructions, and installation. Renowned as a vivid colorist, Mazur creates dynamic, highly energetic works distinguished by rich pigments and immersive, interactive qualities. Informed by an early background in modern dance and figure drawing, her process synthesizes physical gesture, action painting, and a deep grounding in the human figure.

Mazur earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Modern Dance from Southern Methodist University in 1974, studying under sculptor James Surls. In the early 1980s, Surls featured her paintings at Houston’s Lawndale Annex during the seminal "Fresh Paint" movement, launching her career into national and international exhibition circuits. She later completed her Master of Fine Arts in Painting with a minor in Ceramics at The University of Texas at San Antonio in 1978, followed by post-graduate studies in ceramics under Steve Reynolds from 2000 to 2002.

A central cornerstone of Mazur’s oeuvre is her signature 4-Way Works, a series launched in 1978 exploring human perception, psychology, and spatial orientation. Working directly on the studio floor from all four sides, she crafts compositions intended to be viewed and oriented from any direction. By inviting viewers to rotate the canvas and interpret shifting forms, her work expands upon Cubist principles of simultaneity, transformation, and the reconciliation of opposites, alongside Surrealist approaches to visual suggestion.

Physical movement remains integral to Mazur’s creative methodology. Throughout her career, she has integrated high-intensity physical discipline, including dance, creative movement, Pilates, and Gyrotonic, into her studio process to cultivate focus and momentum. Parallel to her studio work, she taught college-level visual art, ceramic sculpture, art history, and movement disciplines until retiring from academia in 2016.

Mazur played a pivotal role in shaping San Antonio's contemporary art landscape. In 1986, she exhibited in the inaugural Blue Star 1 exhibition, an artist-led initiative that laid the foundation for ContemporarySA at Blue Star. She subsequently served on the Blue Star Board of Directors from 1988 to 1992 and curated the landmark Blue Star Loft Project in 1992, transforming 60,000 square feet of warehouse space to showcase works by over 150 regional artists.

Her work has been recognized through numerous accolades, including a residency at STARTsoma Gallery in San Francisco in 2003, a Creative Capital Grant in 2010, a Freehold Residency in Taos, New Mexico, in 2018, and The Lone Star Featured Artist Award in 2019. Today, Mazur maintains a full-time studio practice in San Antonio, continuing to produce, exhibit, and innovate interactive abstraction. She has been awarded several Individual Artist’s Grants, has been included in major exhibitions, and has had over 20 solo exhibitions. She has continued to run and maintain a working studio for over 45 years. Please see her resume on her website for more details.

Mazur married photographer John Dyer in 1978, and they have two children and seven grandchildren, ages three to fourteen. She now works full-time producing and exhibiting her artwork, participating in residencies, and running her studio.

Artist Statement

My practice explores the boundaries of perception, transformation, and physical space through large-scale, figurative, and abstracted multimedia paintings. Rooted in Expressionism and heavily influenced by Cubism, Surrealism, and Outsider Art, my work functions as a dialogue between figure, fantasy, and abstraction. It is the analytical manipulation of form that explores the raw, automatic depths of intuition. Having trained as a dancer, I approach the canvas gesturally, moving dynamically around it on the floor, throwing, splashing, and staining the surface to translate rhythm and raw emotion into color and viscosity.

A central pillar of my work is the "4-Way Works," paintings intentionally composed to be viewed from all four directions. This multi-directional framework demands a complex orchestration of composition, where positive and negative spaces fluidly shift and shapes transform depending on the viewer’s orientation. By rejecting a single fixed perspective, the narrative quality of my early work has evolved into a conceptual exploration of simultaneity.

My paintings fit into what is described by cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker as the "Metamodernism Movement," or "what comes after the postmodernist era for the 2020s and beyond." In this international movement, artists continue exploring ideas from past art genres and develop them to include issues that are relevant in contemporary culture.

In deliberate resistance to today’s slick digital landscape, I maintain an unapologetic material rawness. My pieces are complete only through the activation of the spectator's imagination, whether they interpret the work through symbolic narrative, the metaphysical concept of transformation, or the rhythmic kinesthetics of dance and music.

This multi-directional philosophy naturally extends into non-traditional installations and cross-disciplinary collaborations. I frequently collaborate with curators and engineers to present works on floors, ceilings, or via custom mechanical devices, such as motorized wall mounts that slowly rotate the canvas 90 degrees every 20 seconds. By disrupting how art is traditionally hung and experienced, I invite viewers to question the stability of their own perception and actively participate in creating meaning.

Things are not always as they appear to be. What is reality? What is abstraction? Everything is actually dependent on our perception and our interpretation of the world around us. I wish for my art to visually attract interest and be an inspiration and an uplifting experience for many people in many fields of knowledge and experience.

https://dianemazur.com
linkedin.com/in/diane-mazur-a9b9a042
facebook.com/diane.mazur98
instagram.com/diane.mazur

Nov 4 Diane Mazur

Nov 4 Helena Bunina

Nov 4 Margaretha Gubernale