Irina Alimanestianu

2024
2022-2023 2020-20212017-2019
2015-2016
2012-2014
2009-2011
2006-2008
2001-2004
1997-2000

Irina is an American artist of Romanian descent. She has an MBA from Columbia University in NYC and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in Southern California. She was raised in Switzerland, France, and New York where she currently resides. Growing up and living in varied environments fed her interest in and sensitivity to cultural differences and overlaps. Her work examines the tension and the harmony between the desire for connection, for the status quo, and the reality of impermanence and constant change.
Irina has shown in the United States and Europe and is in the collections of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, in Madrid, Spain and the Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College in Claremont, CA. Her work has been exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

“The internet, as it began to spread in the later 1990s, gave me the sense that I can and should dialogue with all creative periods and ideas. They were viable, exciting, and present. In 1997, in graduate school, I began to juxtapose varied religious and social iconographies and painting styles in search for my identity as female and white. I was inspired by modern and ancient cultures finding connections between them and my own practice. This led to a more universal search, to the visceral and primordial effects of shape, color, and space on our evolution as a species.
Today my inspiration is further abstracted, more spiritual and philosophical. I think a lot about the vibrational frequencies that surround us, that move through us. The waves we subliminally feel (that science is now mapping) that flow from intention, action, and nature. The energy of things and between things, that affect what happens in our lives, on the planet, and in the universe.”