Maria Ierusalimskaya

Artist Statement

Maria Ierusalimskaya is an international visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York whose work explores perception, memory, and the quiet poetry of everyday objects and architectural spaces. Working primarily in pencil, and occasionally incorporating watercolor and colored pencils, she creates highly detailed works on paper that transform ordinary objects and spaces into contemplative visual studies.

Portraiture and life drawing are central to her artistic practice. Working from live sessions, she seeks to capture fleeting expressions and emotional presence, bringing immediacy and vitality to her work. In her Rainbow series, Maria portrays friends and family members wearing vibrant, multicolored masks—symbols of hope and unity created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and reflecting the resilience of individuals and communities in Brooklyn and beyond.

Maria is also developing her ongoing series Echoes of Place, in which each work captures a fragment of a location encountered during her travels. Through carefully observed details and selective framing, the series explores how places persist as emotional and visual echoes in memory.
Her work has been exhibited in juried exhibitions in New York, New Jersey, and in Iran.