Tatiana Simonova

Tatiana Simonova is a Bulgarian-born artist whose practice spans graphite drawing, lithography, and printmaking — with the print and the drawing treated as parallel investigations of memory, recording, repetition, and erasure. She is now based in Portland, Oregon (PDX), where she works as an artist and educator, having previously been based in New York City for an extended period. Her work circulates through gallery exhibitions in New York and Portland and through international print-exchange channels including exhibitions in Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Hungary.

The principal stated source of her practice is the experience of cultural and physical dislocation — emigrating from Bulgaria to the United States and the resulting tensions between memory of place and the present condition of the immigrant artist. Her chosen media — graphite on paper, lithography, drypoint, and other print processes — function as 'a strategy to explore recording, repeating, memorizing, obscuring and destroying.' The print and the drawing's shared capacity for layered iterative mark-making, with prior states preserved or partially erased beneath subsequent ones, provides her with a formal vocabulary for the displaced subject's relationship to memory.

Her principal documented body of lithographic work is the 'Naoko' series — paired untitled lithographs depicting her friend Naoko, addressing the quiet moment preceding a departure. The portraits are made by lithographic-crayon-blackening of the stone surface followed by careful razor-blade extraction of figure and contour from within the saturated black field. The technique inverts the conventional lithographic relationship — instead of drawing-into-light onto a clean stone, she removes-from-darkness, producing portraits whose principal visual register is the velvet blackness of the lithographic crayon's deep tone. The Naoko series was exhibited and produced in residency at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop / Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) in New York.

Simonova's exhibition record includes nationally circulated venues — David Krut Projects, Heidi Cho Gallery, Storefront Ten Eyck, and the International Print Center New York (IPCNY) in New York City — and internationally in Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Hungary. The Japanese gallery exhibitions are the principal verification of her Japan-tied practice; her circulation through Japanese print-exchange channels places her within the broader trans-Pacific contemporary-printmaking exchange community that has developed through residencies, biennials, and exchange portfolios since the 1990s. Her recent participation in 'Ekphrasis: A PCC Faculty Exhibition' at Portland Community College (February 26 - April 17, 2026) presented 'The Speaker Revealed' (2022-24, graphite on paper, 44 × 60 inches) — a large-scale graphite drawing that extends her sustained interest in scale, surface, and the slow accumulation of mark.

She is currently a member of the PCC printmaking and drawing faculty in Portland, where she teaches studio practice alongside her continuing exhibition output. Her lithography is anchored in the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop's continuing US lithography lineage, the same workshop where her contemporary Chunwoo Nam (b. 1965, Seoul/Buffalo) was an artist in residence in 2006-07. The Robert Blackburn workshop's curatorial mandate — international printmaking exchange across cultural and political borders — provides Simonova's practice with its principal institutional anchor.