Location: Greece
Maria Glyka has studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2006, MFA) with a scholarship by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and the Athens School of Fine Arts (2002, BA) as well as graphic design at the Vakalo Art and Design College (1993, Diploma). She has won and shortlisted for numerous awards including the Jerwood Contemporary Painters (2007), the Gemine Muse (2005) for “Young artist in European Museums”, the Celeste Prize in London (2006). She has participated in residencies and exhibitions internationally (Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Uk, USA etc). She has been one of the main coordinators of Utopia Project workshops (2006-2010) hosted by ASFA in Rethymno, Crete, Greece. She taught at the Foundation of Slade Summer School, UCL, London (2015-2019) and since 2009 she teaches art and design as an accredited lecturer of the University of Derby on the BA and MA of the Vakalo Art and Design College, Athens.
My practice shifts between printed material and unfolds into spaces where words, images, and memories coexist. I grew up surrounded by offset machines, inks, and papers, where I first learned the importance of process, repetition, and materiality. This early familiarity with paper, imprint, and "errors" still impacts the way I work today: I paint, print, fold, and unfold surfaces; I transform objects in search of their visual sound. On these surfaces I paint, rearrange them in space, photograph or video-record them, so they can be revealed anew—each time with a different intensity and rhythm.
I move between painting, the printed image, and artist books, treating each form as a site of expression and creation. I am interested in the printed sheet, the page (blank or printed), packaging, and the card (greeting card, business card)—familiar forms that are often overlooked or trapped in functional modes. I enlarge them, reframe them, and pull them out of their everyday context to reveal their poetic and sculptural possibilities, as well as the social and political systems they contain: how we archive, how we remember, how a story is written—and who writes it—especially when it concerns women’s experiences and voices.
Within the small architectural spaces of artist books, the visual coexist with the verbal, folds become statements, and gaps acquire meaning. I am interested in holding this meaning and the body of the material, and investigate the ways form can restrict or liberate. I explore relationships born of uncertainties and differences: hidden details, secret openings, emerging signs, nonlinear narratives that are never fully revealed but read again and again.
In installations and live performances, spoken word, sound, printed image, and video create spaces of dialogue. I project images onto paper and cardboard surfaces, connect exterior and interior spaces, and invite the viewer to cross through the work and experience it as a seeing as a series of parallel actions: sounds, visual events, direct and indirect connections without predetermined outcome, to map the in-between—what exists and does not exist, what happens between things and within memory.
I research this persistent transformation: of materials, media, stories, and gestures. A practice rooted in print traditions but open to new technological and narrative fields, one that redefines identity and gender, as well as the material and imaginary spaces we choose to inhabit.
