Diane Dal-Pra was born in 1991 in Périgueux, France. She lives and works in Paris.


Dal-Pra works primarily in large-scale oil on linen, building her paintings slowly and in layers, from memory rather than observation. Trained in the technical precision of the Renaissance painters she cites as significant influences, her work has progressively moved away from the figure toward something more elusive - a presence sensed rather than seen. The body is no longer depicted so much as implied: in the weight of a fold, the trace of a braid, the suggestion of something that has only just left the frame. Dal-Pra describes her practice as an attempt to paint the in-between state - the space where an image is never entirely formed nor entirely dissolved, where time does not disappear but accumulates in sensitive layers. Her palette, subtle and tonal, and her smooth, almost imperceptible brushwork hold the work in a state of equilibrium - material and immaterial at once, grounded and dissolving.


Dal-Pra’s work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; HEM Museum, Foshan; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; the ICA Miami, Miami; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul.