Biography
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, 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.
The stated source of her practice is the experience of cultural and physical dislocation — emigrating from Bulgaria to the United States and the resulting tension between memory of place and the present condition of the immigrant artist. She describes her chosen media — graphite on paper, lithography, and other print processes — as 'a strategy to explore recording, repeating, memorizing, obscuring and destroying.' The shared capacity of print and drawing for layered, iterative mark-making, in which prior states are preserved or partially erased beneath later ones, gives her a formal vocabulary for the displaced subject's relationship to memory.
Among her documented lithographic work is the 'Naoko' series, an untitled pair of lithographs depicting her friend Naoko and addressing the quiet moment preceding a departure. The portraits were made by blackening the stone with lithographic crayon and then extracting the figure and its contours from within the saturated black field with a razor blade — inverting the conventional lithographic approach by removing form from darkness rather than drawing into light, so that the crayon's deep tone remains visible, particularly in the dark passages of the hair. The series is documented through the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts) in New York.
Simonova has exhibited nationally at 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 — placing her work within the international print-exchange circuits through which contemporary printmakers have connected across borders. She is a member of the printmaking and drawing faculty at Portland Community College, where she teaches studio practice alongside her continuing exhibition output.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇧🇬Bulgaria
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Figures
- Works Indexed
- 2
Frequently Asked Questions
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, 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.
Tatiana Simonova's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Tatiana Simonova's prints frequently feature figures.
