Irina Alimanestianu

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I believe there is an always-present nonverbal language that is collectively experienced yet individually felt. It is a primordial language that has naturally evolved within us since we were single cell organisms, learning survival and communication, to our current evolutionary state. Its presence is everywhere and it leaves its effect. This process started for me in 1997, when I began exploring human connections to the self and the divine through our cultural heritage; appropriating iconography of world religions and pop culture into my paintings of archetypes and social mores. In 2005, as I sought further understanding of the human condition, I explored this non-verbal collective language through a study of biomorphic objects and their relationships to each other. It was a process-based practice, wherein I created, photographed, and painted from sculpted enigmatic miniatures in staged tableaux. In my current body of work, I remove the notions of solids, of mass, of volume. It is a sensory reading of the environment, its past and present, and its vibrational tones that surround and compel me. A boulder on a hillside creates ripples in the air that moves around it. The shadow of a building places a weight on one’s shoulders. My paintings are about this sensory relationship, reaching down to a level of unseen subtlety. I render, through color and shape, the connections, associations, and links that are a part of life. These connections became further distilled into the raw...

Artwork