contact/
ilieva.mar01@gmail.com
@m.iliv
+351 925 857 011
download full cv
recent exhibitions/
2026
Free Radicals, Galerias da FBAUL, Lisbon, PT (upcoming)
shortie?, Kanaal40, Amsterdam, NL
2025
Círculos vivos, open studios at Quinta das Relvas, Branca, PT
Reverberations, KOOP, Sofia, BG
Sofia Six, Untiled gallery, Sofia, BG
Afterglow Frquencies, JPA Studios at London Design Week, UK
Oosterdok Tour, by ARCAM, Amsterdam, NL
2024
A Letter from a Friend, Bacio Collective, Bern, CH
Slices of Strata, Galleri Blunk, Trondheim, NOR
Loose Sediments, for FIG.4
at Octopus Art Space, Sofia, BG
Japanese Knotweed Festival,
at Mediamatic, Amsterdam, NL
Art Start,
Credo Bonum Gallery and Goethe Institut, Sofia, BG
Fellowship with Center for Social Vision,
Sofia, BG
Blauwhout, wijkpark De Horst and Podium Noord, The Hague, NL
pv
Maria Ilieva (2001) is an artist residing in Lisbon with a practice based in drawing and olfaction. Spending her life between three countries, she was confronted from an early age with the reality of immigrants abroad, the necessary speed for adaptation in unfamiliar environments and the limits of language. This in turn shaped her worldview into a fragmentary familiarity imposed on unknown situations - feeling half-present, and only somewhat understood.
Her methods of collecting, categorizing and hoarding, and their associated ways of perceiving, merge with intrigue and observation for matters of memory, processes of remembering and forgetting, dreaming as visual and emotional memory, and the division of our personal mental space. She often uses whimsicalness or absurdity to search for a synthesis in cognition.
Using tracing paper and graphite, the delicate materials further merge with their surroundings - posing questions of beginnings and ends of visible and invisible spaces. By collaging and layering these fragments, an overlap is produced, resulting in a taxonomy of the elusive, the transient, the implicit. Each piece overlapping the other, as traces of living and thinking, she seeks ways to make sense of boundaries - both social and self-imposed.
She works at Mediamatic’s Aromalab, Europe’s largest open scent library. As scent receptors are positioned closest to the part of the brain storing memory, the olfactory aspect to her works further emanates the intangible, delicate whiffs of information we might not even realise we come in contact with.