About

About

Meriliis Rinne (MERU) is an Estonian-born artist living and working in the United Kingdom. Her practice moves between abstraction and the female figure, exploring tensions between structure and freedom, surface and depth, control and intuition.

Material and process are central to MERU’s work. She constructs many of her own canvases and works with recycled textiles, burlap, found materials and unconventional surfaces. Layers are built, disrupted and reworked, allowing traces of resistance, friction and transformation to remain visible within the finished work.

Her female figures exist between presence and disappearance. Rather than literal depictions, they emerge through and dissolve into the painted surface—strong, vulnerable and continually transforming.

At the centre of MERU’s practice is a personal understanding of art as a way of experiencing what it means to be human first, a woman second, and an artist third. Her female figures grow from this perspective: they are not portraits of particular women, but psychological presences shaped by identity, memory, instinct and lived experience.

In 2022, MERU established her independent studio in Windsor, UK, following earlier studio practices in London and Tallinn. Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom and internationally, with presentations and projects in Venice, London, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Mexico and Estonia. Solo exhibitions in Estonia include Haus Gallery (2017), Solaris Gallery (2020) and Põhjala Factory (2020).

MERU is a member of Art Society Soho and ArtCan, and her work has been featured in Estonian cultural publications including ERR Kultuur and Sirp.

For MERU, painting is an investigative process—a way of examining what lies beneath emotional and societal structures. Through material, gesture and repeated transformation, tension becomes something physical: built into the surface rather than simply represented upon it.