Irina Alimanestianu
20262025
2024
2022-2023 2020-20212017-2019
2015-2016
2012-2014
2009-2011
2006-2008
2001-2004
1997-2000
Irina Alimanestianu is an American painter of Romanian descent, living and working in New York City and Southampton, NY.
Environment, body memory, and the spiritual experience felt therein, are central to her practice. The vibrational tones of landscape, object, and personal history are building blocks for her imagery. She paints, draws and collages. Her style has evolved from representational to abstraction, now including a mix thereof.
Irina’s work has been shown in the USA and Europe. Museum shows include “LA Current” at the Hammer Museum in 1998 in Los Angeles, CA, “Artists Choose Artists“ in 2019, chosen by Alexis Rockman, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY. Her paintings were presented in the traveling exhibition "New American Talent" in 2000 – 2001 which included The Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, TX, curated by LA Times critic David Pagel. Solo shows include "Strands, Threads, Metabolic Meditations" at MM Fine Art Gallery in Southampton, NY in 2021, and “Solo” at Kravets/Wehby in New York, NY in 1999. She currently shows with Keyes Art in Sag Harbor, NY.
Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, Austria, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, and the Pomona College Museum of Art in Pomona, CA. She received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, CA, in 1998. She was raised in Switzerland, France, and New York.
Environment, body memory, and the spiritual experience felt therein, are central to her practice. The vibrational tones of landscape, object, and personal history are building blocks for her imagery. She paints, draws and collages. Her style has evolved from representational to abstraction, now including a mix thereof.
Irina’s work has been shown in the USA and Europe. Museum shows include “LA Current” at the Hammer Museum in 1998 in Los Angeles, CA, “Artists Choose Artists“ in 2019, chosen by Alexis Rockman, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY. Her paintings were presented in the traveling exhibition "New American Talent" in 2000 – 2001 which included The Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, TX, curated by LA Times critic David Pagel. Solo shows include "Strands, Threads, Metabolic Meditations" at MM Fine Art Gallery in Southampton, NY in 2021, and “Solo” at Kravets/Wehby in New York, NY in 1999. She currently shows with Keyes Art in Sag Harbor, NY.
Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, Austria, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, and the Pomona College Museum of Art in Pomona, CA. She received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, CA, in 1998. She was raised in Switzerland, France, and New York.
An intuitive thinker Irina currently approaches her practice as though it were an improvisational dance. The paintings take form through a call and response of layering, collage, and erasure. Following surrealist practices she begins with automatic drawing. The lines and shapes made with paint, ink, and graphite, she believes, have their own agency; the subject matter, the narrative reveals itself.
While painting her thoughts meander from the conceptual to the personal and back again giving her landscapes and abstractions a dynamic quality. A sense of place and story line is there but shifts with the act of looking. In her work the rocks, rivers, trees, and air meld and dissolve, they offer a visual glimpse into the feeling of the eternal through the specific.