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For Miki the process of creating her paintings is to an extend unpredictable, and the fluidity of the outcome is, in itself, a source of inspiration. The materials she employs suggest to her new possibilities; the process of mixing her paints from natural oils and mineral pigments introduces serendipitous variations; the ways textures assume three-dimensional shapes on the canvas potentially lead to new forms.
The organic nature of materials Miki favors – linen, wood, paper, pure pigments, oils, and ink – is complemented by the organic process of creation as she surrenders to a kind of flow of ideas and images, conjuring up trees and wings, musical impressions and poetic associations, light and motion, daring and surrender. The images seem to take form before the viewer’s eyes, assuming dimension and depth, and at the same time pull the viewer into the canvas. This pulsating sensation gives Miki’s works a quality of organic life.
Miki’s works have been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows and are held in private collections in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, India, United Kingdom and the United States.
2022 Part2Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2021 Cryxel NFT Community Collage
2021 Part2Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany
2020 Mtihani Luck and Logic, Düsseldorf, Germany
2019 Untitled Artfair, Miami Beach
2019 Camera Obscura Art Lab, Santa Monica, CA
2019 Annenberg Beach House, Santa Monica, CA
2019 Scene, Kayne Griffin Corcoran
2019 LA Art Show, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2018 Every Breath You Take, Jason Vass, Santa Monica, CA
2018 LA Art Show, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2018 Untitled Artfair, Miami Beach
2018 Camera Obscura Art Lab, Santa Monica, CA
2018 Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica, CA
2018 Art Share LA, Think Tank Gallery, LA, United States
2017 Think Tank Gallery, LA, United States
2017 Untitled Artfair, Miami Beach
2017 Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, GB
2017 ArtHamptons, Bridgehampton, NY, USA
2017 LA Art Show, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2016 AAF London 2016, Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, GB
2016 Think Tank Gallery, LA, United States
2016 AAFSG, Artspace Warehouse, Singapore.
2015 ArtHamptons, Bridgehampton, NY, USA
2015 AAF London 2015, Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, GB
2015 Young Masters Exhibition, Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, GB 2015 Summer Exhibition, Artspace Warehouse, Los Angeles, CA, USA 2015 Palm Springs Fine Art Fair, Palm Springs, CA, USA
2015 LA Art Show, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2014 Pastiche and Irony, Berlin, Germany
2014 ArtHamptons, Bridgehampton, NY, United States
2014 Aufbruch und Übergang, Berlin, Germany
2013 Unseasonable Divas, Zurich, Switzerland
2012 Season Divas, Düsseldorf, Germany
2020 Miki Reimann, Mtihani. New York. ISBN: 234-7320332095.
2016 Miki Reimann, Book of Mtihani, New York. ISBN: 234-7320332095.
2015 Miki Reimann, Urban Divas. London. ISBN: 978-1851777761.
2014 LDXArtodrome Gallery, Edition III Catalogue, Berlin, 2014. ISBN: 978-0852599143.
When I took the arduous decision to leave behind my home in London, escaping the securities of a corporate environment, to reinvent myself as an artist - I opened up dimensions of life, to which no school nor business venture could have ever prepared me for. Opening up to a free falling artistic career, while liberating myself from responsibilities and expectations, and I came face to face with the mental anguish that comes with true artistry.
It made me deeply wonder about the nature of inspiration or the concept of a muse. Wrapping my head around it for a while, consulting scientific literature - ranging from cognitive psychology to neuroplasticity and epigenetics to quantum physics, conversing with business professionals as well as the creative community, venturing out into yoga and spiritual literature, and last but not least, retreating in an Indian Ashram for seven weeks, I was able to formulate my own understanding of Grace and create a life/passion balance, which became part of my artistic statement.
Growing up bilingually in a Russian family in a German household, I learned a concept of happiness, which is enrooted in the joy of achievement as much as in the thrill of creative effort, much like Franklin D. Roosevelt once supposingly defined it. In a technical and mathematical environment, where accomplishments were rewarded and failure generously prosecuted, I have come to develop a diverse set of creative interests. This innate duality, parted with a native stubbornness and an assorted European academic experience brought me a steady entrepreneurial and corporate career. Eventually, I decided to take the leap and pursue a career in arts. Therefore, it is not surprising that I see the art market with different eyes than traditionally trained artists. Meanwhile, I have noticed that many artists fear the business component. They think, “I would rather just create my art”, but in today’s world, building a business can be a form of creativity. It can become a “living canvas”, which is constantly evolving and requires multiple creative choices every day. It’s ironic to think about the creative depths people will go to convince others they aren’t creative.
Overall, the challenges of balancing productivity, creativity and sanity are real not just for artists: We all experience euphoric seasons when we are almost manically obsessed with a project that we can hardly seem to finish sketching a good idea before the next one pops into our brain. In such times, we must remind ourselves to eventually take a calmer and more measured look at our work, knowing that everything is likely not as brilliant as it seemed at first. What follows this phase is usually a dry spells where it feels like our work is worthless and we just can’t hit on a good idea — which is exactly when we must cling more firmly to the confidence that our muse has not deserted us, but merely left our side for a moment, and will return soon enough. We all face the same struggles; some brave souls just have to face them more directly, in both life and art. The ones who know what the inventive genie could do for them once it got out of the bottle. But who have also caught a glimpse of the size and power of the beast. Who know what is at stake. Who understand that creativity is too large a thing to advocate lightly.
But a true craftsperson does not let herself be downed by this natural duality. The craftsperson develops a knowingness about the work she does that bears its own fruit of being present, or attentive. The craftsperson learns that within the work she does there is a jewel hiding below the surface. That the thrill of the craft is to discover the jewel. And that there is only one way to discover it: to practice the craft mindlessly. To become one with the work. To polish and polish, as though with one’s heart. That there is no way to know when the jewel will show itself, but to trust with all one’s heart that one day, when it is least expected, the jewel will be there! It will appear.
Those musings about inspiration and values of family, friendship and grace are flowing into my art and want to be shared with the viewers. On the one hand, my art is very personal, as it derives from my own experiences and accompanied me in a very transcending time in my life. On the other hand, being abstract, it’s interpretation lies with the viewers and thus can serve as a source of inspiration. I see the pieces as uplifting, as cleansing and purifying, as a visual affirmation or a mediation medium.
I am blessed with wonderful and talented people, who have inspired and sume in the creation of the Mtihani Collection over the years.I am very thankful to my family, who has always been an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom and encouragement and to whom I owe everything I am today. They are my partners in crime and my perpetual voices of conscience. They are challenging me for as long as I can remember and help to bring out the very best in me.
Further, I am grateful to loving and caring friends for the magic they create and happiness they bring into my life. They serve as a stimulus and an inspiration and provide support and practical help wherever I turn.
I am very lucky to have amazing collectors of my work in many countries and I don’t take their trust and genuine interest in my talent for granted.
I would also like to offer special thanks to my beautiful galleries and talented gallerists and curators and dealers for their confidence and constant high expectations. Their investments of time and energy is simply incredible.
Last, but not least, I am much obliged to the skilled staff involved in every project I do, which makes those possible in the first place.
For me, to express the spiritual in tangible form, art has to be abstract; so it can play with the viewers’s imagination, while provoking an emotional response. It also has to be organic; organic art reeks of a certain inner familiarity, something very fundamental and indispensable in our lives. Supported by pure, wholesome, colors and rudimentary, sustainable material, art provides comfort and invites viewers to share into the inspiration.
I find inspiration in the everyday. In literature, music, cinematography, but above all in the people around me. Musicians and poets. Writers and movie makers. Entrepreneurs and corporate warriors. People who lead awe-inspiring or blissfully boring lives; to whose stories I listen, wondering about what worries and excites them, what lifts them up.
Once in a while, it is important for me and my inspiration to go elsewhere: move away from urban into pastoral settings, make space for meditation and cloud watching. Depart into unknown lands and cultures. Making every piece I create a landmark of the journey. I use travel as a natural force of motivation, while slowly turning into a storyteller.
Being able to communicate my stories visually and provoking people to think differently or experience an emotion is truly magical. Inspiring each other on a multidisciplinary level and actively partake in the circle of creativity is very rewarding. Meanwhile, the lesson of the moth teaches us that “it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty / than to live a long time and be bored all the while”.
Education
A precocious child, Miki Reimann was encouraged and stimulated in her development from an early age. Accepted at the age of three to the school affiliated with the Academy of Arts in her native Chelyabinsk (Russia), and supported by the Association for Gifted and Talented Children, she began to paint in pastel and aquarelle. After her family moved to Germany, Miki combined art classes, music lessons, dance and tennis practice with her regular school work. Her curiosity drove her continuously to seek out and explore new opportunities. She began her college studies at the University of Cologne with economics and politics, in line with her parents’ mathematical and business careers, and layered her coursework with hands-on experience as an assistant to the editor-in-chief at a publishing house. Her love of art spurred her to change her major to Art History, and she enrolled at the University of Düsseldorf to take advantage of its innovative program that took her to museums around Europe and seminars at the Sorbonne and Università degli Studi di Firenze. When art alone did not provide all the intellectual nourishment Miki craved, she completed her degree with a specialization in Linguistics and Literature in English, German, and Russian at the University of Zurich. All these experiences have found their way into her artwork.
Evolution of Mtihani
Miki’s artistic evolution, and especially her Mtihani collection, has been inspired by her inquisitiveness. Keen to learn about the properties of materials, she delved into oil color preparation and explored how different formulae interact with canvas, creating rich textures and color transitions. She chose to paint the Mtihani series primarily in black and white in order to dwell on the dialogue between polar opposites. She also drew inspiration from a rich array of sources: other artists, her travels, music, literature, and nature.
Miki’s experimentation with raw elements and their effects has some roots in her admiration for Leonardo da Vinci, who regularly sought to extend traditional techniques so as to discover new visual effects. Chinese calligraphy prompted her to work in ink and probe the expressive potential of black and white contrasts. Salvador Dali’s surrealist canvases spurred Miki’s interest in stories spun by the unconscious as it comes into contact with visual forms. Contemporary British artist Keith Tyson, known for voraciously embracing diverse media and forms, is Miki’s exemplar for expansion into found objects and limitless imagination they unleash. She cites as another model Ostap Bender, the hero of Ilf and Petrov’s novel The Twelve Chairs – a master of following his instincts and being endlessly creative out of the experiences and obstacles life put in his path.
While Miki’s first collection, Divas, was figurative, she turned to abstraction in the Mtihani series in order to unleash a greater range of interpretative possibilities, both within herself and in her viewers. “Being abstract, its interpretation lies with the viewers and thus can serve as a source of inspiration for them as well. I see the pieces as uplifting, as cleansing and purifying. As a visual affirmation or a meditating medium,” she says.
Abstract painting reveals itself through deep contemplation and invites the beholder to bring his or her own experiences to the encounter. As one looks at abstract images, they open up to the eye and the imagination, conjuring up associations and prompting the creation of one’s own narratives. Gary Garrels, the curator of “Oranges and Sardines” exhibition at the Hammer Museum, described the mechanism by which abstract art stimulates both artists and audiences: “By pushing away from external reference, abstraction enabled artists to explore a wide variety of visual expression. They were able to more fully engage subjectivity, emotional expression, decorative embellishment, complex metaphors, spiritual connection, and philosophical inquiry.” He adds, “Painting as a physical phenomenon retains linkages to material existence, to the visceral, obdurate, and fragile character of life... It offers an experience that in turn inflects experience, deepening and enriching our ability to reckon with who we are and where we have been.”
Miki expands the interpretative possibilities of her paintings by forming them into diptychs. These, too, draw on her wide-ranging interests. The name of her collection – Mtihani – is a Swahili word for “test” and the series serves this idea in a number of ways. It is a test for Miki of her engagement with pigments and supports: her mastery of materials and attentiveness to what they teach her and unfold before her. It is also a version of Rorschach test for both her and the viewer. The mirrored, black and white, abstract images of Rorschach test are intended to stimulate perception, unlock the thought-process, access emotions suggested by the subject’s psyche, and take the beholder on a journey of self-discovery. This is, in part, the effect intended by the Mtihani collection. It is an invitation to a conversation and a co-creation of the work and its meaning. Indeed, Miki has deliberately orchestrated conversations before her Mtihani diptychs by placing two chairs in front of them and staging an opportunity for a dialogue prompted by the artworks.
Organic Art
For Miki the process of creating her paintings is to an extend unpredictable, and the fluidity of the outcome is, in itself, a source of inspiration. The materials she employs suggest to her new possibilities; the process of mixing her paints from natural oils and mineral pigments introduces serendipitous variations; the ways textures assume three-dimensional shapes on the canvas potentially lead to new forms.
The white on white Mtihani canvases call to mind the paintings of Robert Ryman, whose work similarly explored the intersection between art as object and as surface, between sculpture and painting, between structure and ornament, and emphasized the role played by perception in generating aesthetic experience. Ryman often worked in white paint applied to canvas, paper, wood, plastic, or metal, and sought to bring out the nuanced effects of light and shadow through the textures of paint, thus animating the surface of his paintings.
The organic nature of materials Miki favors – linen, wood, paper, pure pigments, oils, and ink – is complemented by the organic process of creation as she surrenders to a kind of flow of ideas and images, conjuring up trees and wings, musical impressions and poetic associations, light and motion, daring and surrender. The images seem to take form before the viewer’s eyes, assuming dimension and depth, and at the same time pull the viewer into the canvas. This pulsating sensation gives Miki’s works a quality of organic life.
Duality
“The idea for the abstract diptychs came to me over Christmas,” Miki recalls “It is supposed to be a particularly cheerful time, meanwhile people perceive it as rather stressfull. We seem to be constantly striving for a balance between positive and negative emotions, instead of embracing life with all its parts. Like light and shadow, every emotion and every feeling has its counterpart. I just suddenly had this image before my inner eye: The Black cannot without the White. This idea developed and through the different parts of the collection it has mutated, following in a way a life of its own and dragging me along.”
Duality is indeed a thread that runs through Miki’s life, career, and artwork. Her family consists of mathematicians and business people, and Miki pursued economics at the start of her college curriculum and in a corporate environment next to and after finishing her degree. Yet she has always been drawn to artistic expression and found ways to layer it with her more pragmatic pursuits. She is at once fluidly creative and highly organized. Her diptychs form a relationship of two similar, yet not fully identical parts, an amalgamation of meaning through a dialogue between the two halves.
Coming of Age
While it is impossible – especially in abstract art – to draw direct lines of correspondence between artworks and the catalysts that brought them into being, the inspirations behind the different parts of Mtihani are palpable in Miki’s diptychs. While Mti - a single white-gold canvas, reminiscent of a tree, serves as the prelude and base to the overall collection, Original Mtihani conveys the feeling of unfolding, testing, and spreading of the artist’s wings at the beginning of her artistic journey. Budding Mtihani captures the experimentation, discovery of new possibilities, and joy of seeing the emergence of this new body of art. The rich, lush textures of Non Fiction and Shadowlands reflect in paint the intensely emotional quality of music that spurred those part of the series. Meanwhile, Moth was inspired by an encounter with hummingbird-sized Atlas Moths in Maui. Adapting Mtihani – prompted by Miki’s trip to Galapagos Islands – uncannily echoes the processes of geological and biological formation so apparent there. Prismatic Mtihani – the only part of the collection in which color in the backdrop comes into play – was born of Miki’s reminiscence of her parents’ home and the combination of warmth and complexity of family life that creates the tension between sending us out into the world and tugging us back into its fold. Ink Dialogues was inspired by Miki’s lifelong love for literature. Geometry of the Universe stems from Miki’s fascination with numbers – the fabric of her family’s professional lives – and her interest in history and philosophy. Numbers serve as the undercurrent of the whole Mtihani collection: the first twelve main parts of the series corresponding to first twelve months over which the budding artistic journey unfolded; the doubling inherent in the diptychs; the syncopated rhythm of different numbers of paintings within the first twelve parts. The dialogue between orderliness and spontaneity in the overall Mtihani collection is an embodiment of Miki’s personality. Serendipity was inspired by the realization that the heaviness of success-chasing can be replaced with a serendipitous lightness, when one recognizes that the only rules and limits are those we set for ourselves. La Mariposa - the first large commission - invited for the first time a few shades of color into the black and white spectrum, inspired by a faulty photograph. The series then leads into The Maze, which leaves behind the mirroring, diptych realms for a single square piece, where black and white pigments are aligned in a spiral shape, brings to mind Fibonacci’s golden ratio. It also reminds of a labyrinth, which as an ancient symbol relating to wholeness. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. It represents a journey to our own center and back again into the world. Luck and Logic dives into the spectrum on pure, unbleached linen and speaks of a new-found warmth of a new-found home. Root to Rise discovers the spiritual dimension, inspired by a visit to an Indian Ashram. Leaving familiar surroundings and venturing out into nature, only to find the most intimate patterns starring back at you in the form of seashells in the sand gives birth to Mírame. Meanwhile, Azaleh explores the relationship with the ocean, and gives rise to a poem of the same name. The series eventually culminates in Roar Shack, where alcohol ink and paper meet in one single canvas, which replaces the dyptics - visually demonstrating how in the evolution of Mtihani Duality turns into Unity, no longer are we seeing ourselves as separate from the whole, but rather we realize that we are part of the whole, and it is a part of us.
The way the collection has come together reminds of a hero’s journey with a call to adventure, an odyssey, dragon-battles, death and rebirth and a resurrection - returning home with the elixir. It is a coming of age story.
Miki’s works have been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows and are held in private collections in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, India, United Kingdom and the United States.
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