TheCollector Interviews Anys Reimann, Contemporary Artist

From her studio in Düsseldorf, capital of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Anys Reimann is busy using her art to interrogate identities. Through her work, she deconstructs the assumptions people place on women, people of color, and others who may seem like outsiders in their societies. With a seemingly effortless wave of a paintbrush, Reimann turns such societal complexities into physical works of art. Glossy magazine prints of women’s bodies are taken apart and pasted into collages, and the words of poets are transformed into enormous mobile installations. Reimann takes one form of art and turns it into something new, something entirely her own.

Though she addresses such serious societal questions, Reimann’s sources of inspiration are much more eclectic. From science fiction to personal childhood memories, Reimann is able to turn nearly anything she encounters into a work of art.

I’ll admit, in my architectural studies, I was bored by the traditionally male-dominated hierarchical and classical “mass movement” of the time. However, I was lucky enough to encounter several extraordinary mentors who, even after my studies, taught me form-finding based on tried and tested cultural knowledge, global material knowledge, and a good portion of experimental contemporaneity. Through product design and 1:1 design, I learned to think out of the box; my designs were always based on an inherent historical core but had a modern look.

Between ten years ago and today, how has your art developed and changed over time? What primary themes and mediums did you initially focus on, and do you still work with them today?

At first, I made collages—snippets of thoughts combined with drawings, watercolors, and sketches—and leather and latex sculptures of indeterminate body shapes. However, the themes became too “big” and the works too “small.” For example, a leather picture from an old book cover with a collage based on a sentence by James Baldwin or an essay by Toni Morrison reinterpreted as a dark, incomprehensible cloth installation with protruding leather bellows. My themes were taken from cultural experiences that were actually foreign to me, namely, the constant and brutal inhumane breaking of the Black self as experienced through the tradition of violence and bigotry white America perpetrates toward people of color and Indigenous humans. It was culturally a terra incognita!

Today, the “dimensions” have converged [in my work]. For me, art is, at best, organic—it manifests itself as a body! My themes have become more personal without losing sight of the big picture. I refer to myths, history, stories, and experiences—everything from fairy tales, films, and pop culture to music and poetry—all told in the now.

Today, I address identity, gender issues, and nature. The biographical is the human; femininity is top core; being POC is an attribute—a richness lies in being both Black and white and in being a mother. I am many, and do not accept singular attributions made by people who are not me. My “layers of meaning” are therefore tangible and made known to the viewer through my works.

My media has remained diverse, and all evoke skin and physicality. I realize these themes through “life”-sized, painted-over collages. Sculpture serves me as hieroglyphs, installation is a spatial symbol for me, and poetry and text are metaphors for person, space, mood, and scents. Oil painting, however, is a newer material for me but has been an old love.

I almost had no choice, as I’ve been collaging since I was a preschooler! My stepfather was a photographer, and I grew up surrounded by piles of magazines and photo books that gradually fell victim to my scissors.

Born into a light-skinned majority society with nearly no POC presence, I collected images of other people of color and made my own images with them. In addition, the female body has been “taken apart” for thousands of years, undressed by looks and fashions, and literally modified to the point of disfigurement; this concept therefore literally cries out for collage.

The fundamental taking apart, a sort of autopsy or dissection, of a topic is the basis of research and new development. I expose, look at, and put together differently, reflect what was and still is “new and unthinkable,” as can be experienced every day. Irony and exaggeration do the rest and serve as a distorting mirror at the fair of fixed opinions.

Collage is reality in a new fantastic composition.

On a similar note, would you say that your own lived experience as a bicultural, Afro-European woman is reflected in these works? To what extent are these deconstructions of external attributions informed by personal experience, and to what extent are they informed by collective experience?

I am almost a little grateful for this question because it is often assumed in advance for my person that my experience is diasporisch, which translated means that I have an existence with a traumatized background, such as an involuntary loss of home in relation to my alleged ethnicity. This is not necessarily the case for me. If anything, it was actually my North German mother’s family who struggled with the trauma of the fatherless flight from East Prussia after the Second World War. My biological father, Tatia Sekou Coumbassa, came from Guinea, where he had been politically active, and had met my mother during his studies in Paris. However, it was also prejudices that eventually led to their separation.

Naturally and without question, my diverse heritage as a POC woman is reflected in my work. The everyday micro-racism, litanies of exoticization and exclusion, misogynistic double standards, as well as encounters with and stories from other POC friends, classmates, and fellow human beings, have an influence, too. Skin color is still a surefire cause for knee-jerk discriminatory actions and experiences.

I feel this even from the smallest, everyday experiences. When I enter a room as a POC woman, head held high, and order something in clear Hochdeutsch (High German), perhaps with a slight Rhenish inflection, I still receive looks of slight bewilderment, as if it is shocking that I could be a native speaker. Or worse, in today’s times of economic migration, wars, and flight in the 21st century, people of other origins and cultural conventions want to tell me, in my home country, because of my skin color and my gender, I don’t belong here or don’t correspond to their world view of women. That’s another new and terrible phenomenon.

My involuntarily expanded wealth of experience is nourished and unfortunately confirmed by friends and human encounters with people of Surinamese, African American, and Turkish origins, to name a few, and of course by publications and world news.

I would say a sort of automatism sets in when I mentally move toward a theme, a picture, a drawing, or a sculpture, and then the entire work tends to come together.

For example, when I think of Shakespeare’s character, Ophelia, from Hamlet, I reflect on what she stands for: despair and confusion. I connect this feeling to the plight of refugees, especially from what I saw in my experience working in the aid department in Calais. On the other hand, I also connect these feelings to a completely different situation, namely, to oppressed women. Then, a picture emerges, or an installation. In this specific instance, I had made a mobile of dark brown pool toys and a sound collage of water noises in films that hinted at danger.

Another example: To create my sculpture BASIN (Der Ursprung der Welt) (BASIN (The Origin of the World), pictured above), I saw a small ancient Egyptian sculpture housed in the Met in New York, made roughly around 3750-3000 BCE—human feet carrying a vessel—that probably served as a libation bowl. I recreated it with plateau horseshoes and a wash bowl, and there it is, in all its beauty: a portrait full of Layers of Meaning, both new and old.

Sometimes, a single source of inspiration can result in multiple works. Elephant Woman was initially created as a small collage on leather, based on the David Lynch film The Elephant Man (1980). This film is based on a true story about the “other,” an encounter with an alien and its inhuman traits, and vice versa. This, in turn, resulted in a “deformed” bust made of wood, wire, and jute and covered in silver latex and incense wax (soon to be a bronze cast). A year later, I made a large collage oil painting of a hybrid female “elephant-like” figure with an elephant foot, representing the way we often feel as POC, as women, and as humans: alienated.

My paintings tend to be based mainly on art historical themes, but the complexity of the “layers” and their semantics expand them in many perspectives. The media and my themes are, at best, linked, based on each other or providing ideas for the other. The approach is more like a kind of intuitive semantic synesthesia.

So many! From modern and contemporary art, I’ve been influenced by Alice Neel, Rosalyn Drexler, Pauline Boty, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Ousmane Sow, Seydou Keïta, Heidi Bucher, Eva Hesse, Hannah Höch, Romare Bearden, Noah Davis, Jenny Holzer, H.R. Giger, and Francis Bacon. In terms of Old Masters, particularly Flemish artists have influenced me, as well as Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Elder, and Japanese paintings from the Edo period.

I am also highly influenced by literature, particularly the genres of dark romanticism, fantastic realism, sci-fi, and fantasy, and the works of H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Sennett, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Elisabeth Bronfen.

And of course, cinema, in particular Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), John Boorman’s Zardoz (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Federico Fellini’s Casanova (1976) and Roma (1972), Michael Cacoyannis’s The Trojan Women (1971), and David Lynch’s Dune (1984).

One of the impressions I had when looking at your art was, again, the concept of using collage to deconstruct typical depictions of women. I found it to be reminiscent of Barbara Kruger’s works, albeit hers were typically in black and white, while yours are in color and often depict women of color. Is Kruger also a source of inspiration for you, or is this comparison unfounded?

Though Barbara Kruger didn’t directly inspire me, I was certainly influenced by the art of her time! I am so much a child of the 1960s and 1970s and now appreciate her visual language, pop art, and aesthetic.

Figures such as Robert Rauschenberg, Bea Feitler, Heinz Edelmann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Charles Wilp, Tomi Ungerer, and even more influenced me back then. Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview in its early days, as well as other magazine issues from the 1960s and 1970s that my parents had collected, were also sources of inspiration. Then came classical collage artists like Hannah Höch, Romare Bearden, and Max Ernst.

I only learned to appreciate Barbara Kruger later; her statements are conveyed in the way I want to be understood.

I was very unsure at first! [The Bilker Bunker] is a hermetically claustrophobic place charged with meaning. However, after my first tour of the space when it was still under construction, I was impressed with the new rooms. It was so exposed, so naked! Fittingly, the space is raw, filled with layers of meanings, both historical and sedimentary.

This exhibition is altogether a delightful challenge, and it’s wonderful to be able to add my own history to the bunker as its social and cultural purpose evolves. In short, I’m very much looking forward to this opportunity.

The exhibition’s title is “Dark Star Backyard.” Could you explain the idea behind the name and how the works presented respond to it?

Dark Star Backyard is the result of a witty interplay of various words and quotations:

1. The movie Dark Star (1974), director John Carpenter’s first film. It’s a grotesque sci-fi parody and homage to Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which disenchants all pretensions and dull everyday reality.

2. The backyard of my childhood: sooty, in the Ruhrpott (an industrial region in North Rhine-Westphalia) between blast furnaces and a pilsner brewery, a small staked-out brick area with a sandpit and clotheslines.

3. A dark-skinned woman in a contemporary pose, standing out against a black background, with a light shimmering on the horizon.

The central motif for the exhibition, which will also be displayed at the entrance, is also the common thread that runs through my work: It shows sarcasm as well as homage, parody as well as the unveiling of clichés, the distortion of possibly interesting perspectives. I want to show that things—life—can always have several sides and that a status quo is changeable!

As a matter of fact, yes! I am quite lucky to have a lot coming up:

Opening on September 7, 2024 Gallery Van Horn, which represents me, is showing one of my large mobiles in the Wilhelm Hallen in Berlin.

Three weeks later, on September 27, 2024, the KIT (Kunst im Tunnel) in Düsseldorf is opening the group exhibition of the last two years’ recipients of the visual arts sponsorship award of the state capital of Düsseldorf, which I happily won last December 2023.

Finally, in March 2025, I have been invited to participate in a fantastic group exhibition in a museum in North Rhine-Westphalia, which I’m really looking forward to!