Anca Munteanu Rimnic
Treatise on Bruises

6 JUN until 26 JUL 2025

Anca Munteanu Rimnic’s new exhibition is an expanded investigation of skins as conceptual and metaphorical places for her works, skins as they are impacted and transformed by internal or external forces. Skin’s task to delimit separate bodies is made diffuse or blurry, allegorically turned against itself and into a study of confluence. Battered or caressed, resonated or muffled under layers of padding, exposed to inimical circumstances or treated like a precious relic, it mediates the pairing of the corporeal and the abstract in the artist’s project, unifying things and selves and creating a space where they can be imprinted onto one another, engaged in an exchange of attributes.  

The notion of a surface arising at the very intersection of inner turmoil and outer pressures – shaped by their opposed vectors – is captured in an expressionistically deformed physiognomy, equally monstrous and comical, placed on a standardized marble holder, like a mask having swallowed the head it camouflages (Unknown, 2025). A volume is reduced to a jagged surface: the face is the provisional armistice of the forces that puncture and dent it from within and without, proof and residue of their capacities of creation and de-creation. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a mirror is covered with fine organza fabric (In and I, 2025), producing the sense of a vacant visual field when one observes the work from a distance, an initial perception followed by a complex play of reflections and distortions as viewers approach the work and as elements of the décor begin to populate the blankness. Figures or objects become moiré patterns or are seemingly engulfed in a fog, presences are broken into shards or turned to colored shadows and clouds. 

More direct engagements with skin appear in a tapestry (Treatise on Bruises, 2025) that seeks – both chromatically and materially – the likeness of damaged flesh, or a series of sculptural, intensely tactile works that reference goosebumps (Succession of Notes, 2025). Goosebumps are an involuntary response of the dermis to hormone surges triggered by temperature drops or heightened emotional states. Tiny muscles flex in the skin, hair follicles rise, self-perception is swaddled in a diaphanous, vibrating armor – it is as if the pores through which the skin breathes contracted and hardened into sculptural obstructions, like antennae capturing shifts in the environment. Replicating the bumps with different techniques, the works reflect the interplay of emotional stimulus and corporeal mechanics. An experience that is intensely personal and supremely collective, primordial and very much in the now – these contrasts are rendered as a bas-relief at the limit of the perceptible, preserving the tactile memory of an extinguished emotion and perhaps reanimating it. 

Other works reimagine the sculptural body as an overflowing of confines, as that which always exceeds formal corsets, aesthetic containers and the width of pedestals (Gaze, 2025). Across the exhibition, becoming carapace or a blank space to be re-signified, a screen or an interruption, these actual or symbolic skins multiply points of contact between self and world, the ways in which these positions constitute one another, in which to have a body is to see it inflected by, folded and fused with that which the body is not. 

Dynamic elements are added to this study of infinitesimal intervals and spaces of reciprocity by two more works – the actual but nearly imperceptible movement of an object and another’s implied gestural choreography, its resonant understatement, articulate a common exploration of cognitive and imaginative thresholds. These are the points where something palpable – to the mind or to the senses – coheres out of amorphous masses of stimuli, of plumes of signifiers. The first object is Haystack (2024), an imposing, totem-like presence, like an arte povera monument to grass itself and its cycles of regeneration, but also a model of disorder (which motivates the expression “to find a needle in a haystack” for tasks of devilish complexity). A haystack holds together that which renders it asunder. Introducing a mobile element in her sculpture – an electronic device hidden in the hay produces at intervals the slightest, soundless vibration of the stack – Anca Munteanu Rimnic accentuates this liminal quality. The vibration permeates the work with time, or responds to the twofold conceptual nature of haystacks with a two-fold temporality. One is the temporality of the event, so slight it borders on the hallucinatory. “How much motion is, in fact, motion?”, the vibration forces us to ask. The second is the time of consciousness itself, discovering its own unknowability in the objects it examines, pulling apart a static but seemingly animated thing into smaller things and nonthings and anti-things, into affirmations and negations, into distinct timelines and anachronic overlap. 

This exercise in separation and compression is perhaps complemented by the silent maximalism of another work in the exhibition, a punctum of dark emphasis. This sculpture (Canon, 2025) brings together a few tens of reject ebony piano keys, defective because of their weight or the angle at which they were chiseled. The keys are gathered in a black mass whose geometry contrasts, as much as reconciles, what would have been their sonic stridency, maybe undetectable to the untrained ear, if they had been played. In the absence of sound and in its formal rigor, the reverberations of the stray sounds-that-never-were become resolved, harmonized with one another, in a cloud of echoes which precede their origin, of form, functions and fictions following one another in sync. 

– Mihnea Mircan