Maria Glyka

Lives and works in Athens, Greece

Artist statement

My practice begins with printed matter and extends into spaces where words, images, and memories coexist. Growing up among offset machines, inks, and paper, I learned the value of process, repetition, and error. I paint, print, fold, and unfold surfaces—transforming objects and reassembling them in space so they reveal themselves anew with different rhythms. Alongside this, my performative work which expands into image, sound, video, is placing art directly into geographical, political, and social contexts. In Polarities, a collaborative and interdisciplinary platform, I work with artists, performers, and researchers from Europe and Latin America to create site-specific projects that cross borders and distances. Each edition responds to its local cultural and environmental context—from Santiago to London, Athens to Crete—while reflecting on wider structures of identity, heritage, and migration. This shared authorship is central: through performance, expanded cinema, sound, image and text, Polarities investigates how artistic practice can bridge divides, challenge polarities, and open spaces for collective meaning through new technological and analogue medium. When I paint I continue to treat each form—often printed images and artist books—as a site of expression. I work with familiar typologies—the page, the packaging, the card—enlarging or reframing them to expose both their poetic and sculptural qualities, and the systems of memory and history they hold, especially for...

Artwork