Born in Odessa, educated in Florence, living in Berlin, she works in various fields with a wide range of materials and techniques – painting, drawing, video, and architecture. She works on projects for specific locations, such as creating altar rooms, and uses photography and glass in surprising interactions and contexts.
Her works and projects are conceptual and at the same time sensual. Above all they are calm works, living and breathing meditative tranquillity and profundity. Structured surfaces which also find space for the coincidental as creative moments, often lead into unplanned depths of reflection – in the sense of Paul Klee’s creative confession that art does not reproduce the visible, but rather first makes things visible.
Her projects are serious and have high aesthetic – and in the final analysis religious – goals. The big topic of God-created light is a fascination at the centre of her works, the secret of light, its metamorphoses.
The “Plötzensee Diptych” that Diana Obinja created in 2011 as a gift for Pope Benedict on his visit to Berlin underlines this contemplative seriousness and the beauty of light that discloses horrors.
The artist lives and works in Germany and Italy. (Christine Goetz, 2011)