ANNA RÜSTIG

Anna Francesca Rüstig works primarily with figurative sculpture and relief. She studied at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and later trained in stone carving in Italy before working in architectural restoration. Her practice is rooted in a close engagement with material and the human figure. She works with plaster, bronze, aluminium and marble, using traditional sculptural techniques within a contemporary figurative practice.

Her recent work has become increasingly narrative and concerned with women’s lives and experiences. Care, relationships, friendship, mental states and the body become subjects for sculptural images. Experiences that shape everyday life but often remain private, ordinary or overlooked.

Rüstig is particularly interested in relief as a space between image and sculpture, but also as a medium historically connected to storytelling, commemoration and public memory. This history has led her to question which lives and experiences become part of the images through which societies remember themselves, and which remain unseen.

Starting from familiar bodies, gestures, objects and everyday situations, she translates these observations into figurative reliefs and sculptures. Her works move between tenderness and discomfort, seriousness and humour. Rather than treating the monumental and the intimate as opposites, Rüstig brings them into conversation, using the language of figurative sculpture to give form to experiences that are rarely considered monumental.

www.annaruestig.com