Maria Ierusalimskaya is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan, Armenia, in 2006. She worked at the military museum of Armenia as an artist and graphic designer. In 2008 she moved to New York City.
After almost 10 year of hiatus, Maria started to create art again predominantly with pencil and watercolor as her medium. She also started taking portrait commissions around that time.
In her work she shows objects that normally don’t catch people’s attention, or don’t seem important on their own. She tries to give them importance by immortalizing them through her drawings and paintings.
Besides objects, portraiture is very important in Maria’s art; capturing one’s expression at many different moments throughout model’s posing time, and depicting the subject’s essence.
Exhibitions
2019 September – Group exhibition “General Circumstances”, Iran, Tehran
2019 December – Group exhibition “Evening with Muses”, Manhattan, NY
2020 March – Group exhibition “(DE)pict”, La Bodega gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2022 January – Group virtual exhibition “Clash”, The Holy Art gallery, London, UK
2022 January – Group virtual exhibition “Figures”, Art Fluent, online gallery
Rainbow series
Shortly after the pandemic started, I, just like the rest of the world, started spending time at home with my family, without seeing any of my friends or extended relatives. I would sometimes meet with my friends outdoors, ‘social’ distancing and wearing masks, but it was a strange experience not being able to see a person’s face beside their eyes – if they weren’t wearing glasses. I was trying to find a glimmer of hope and positivity in this whole situation. That is when I decided to start my rainbow series; portraits of my friends and family with colorful masks, representing hope and happiness despite the world around us having turned upside down. I really wanted to show how in these dire times, we can still look at the glass half full.
