Artist: Anca Munteanu Rimnic
Exhibition title: Nest
Venue: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
Date: September 12 – November 22, 2015
Photography: Stefan Stark , images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Braunschweig
Anca Munteanu Rimnic’s works derive from the aesthetic potential of the visible world’s things and systems. They make it possible to not only see connections vis-à-vis logic and historicality but also to grasp relationships in their brittleness. Her objects, photographs, videos and installations link personal and social stories and identities, allowing them their fragility by leaving them open-ended and negotiable. Anca Munteanu Rimnic finds a visual or allegorical access to objects and situations in everyday encounters. She develops ideas that always address biographical aspects, both ragarding her native country that she had to leave at an early age and her life as an artist in Germany. Her works take up experience and recurrent recollection as aesthetic and identificational concepts yet they never lose their sketchiness, they rather transform it into strength.
Anca Munteanu Rimnic also operates with precise sculptural gestures in her Braunschweig exhibition, for example when she covers the exhibition space with ten tons of loam, leaving the floor its uncertainty. While the material undergoes changes over the course of the exhibition, begin and completion coincide, thus focussing attention on processuality and production. The loam floor veers between presence and emptiness, forming the foundation for an unusual inlay – a carpet made of glazed white ceramics featuring a geometrical pattern based on Romanian kilims. Edged in the loam ground it appears – similar to the soft knocking that can be heard in the small room of the Remise – like a fading memory.
“Nest”, the title of the presentation, points to the extensive installation as well as the exhibition space as fragile, alterable and temporary structure. At the same time the title also references a very personal understanding of nest as a privately experienced conflict of home between grounding, incompleteness and loss.
Anca Munteanu Rimnic (*1974, lives in Berlin) was born in Romania; at the age of six, she immigrated to Germany with her parents. She studied art at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and studied under John Baldessari at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Mike Kelley and Jack Goldstein at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She has been internationally represented in several international group shows, among others at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2011), at the 4th Moscow Biennale (2011), and at the Kunsthalle Vienna (2014). A comprehensive monograph was recently published by Distanz Verlag, Berlin. “Nest” is Anca Munteanu Rimnic’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
