Born in Russia, her experience is particularly diverse, falling between research projects for the Swiss landscape to an exhibition at the Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts on the impact of new energysystems, then teaching architecture and knowledge of space to the children with the Finnish school ARKKI, and working for design practices in Moscow (Russia), Mendrisio (Switzerland), Genova, Milan (Italy), Baku (Azerbaijan), and Taipei (Taiwan). This interdisciplinary background, as well as exposure to different cultures, has finally raised her interest in photography. Interested in the atmospheric, gaseous, and liquid aspects of reality that inform the aesthetic experience of vision, Maria Lezhnina is an architect and visual artist, working with photography and other visual media. While she has been exhibited in Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Switzerland and China, her most famous series, ‘untitled climates’ investigates new ways of landscape photography, elaborating on climate as what defines the landscape.
Today besides working as Artist, Maria is an Architect at Kris Yao Artech, Consultant for Huafan University and teaches design studio together with Alessandro Martinelli at Shih Chien University.
`marble is a state of matter`, artist book, 72 pages, 2019
The book collects the outcomes of an investigation of environmental dynamics developed for the Taiwan Culture Expo 2019. This investigation used the water surface as sensor. By the means of ebru painting techniques, color was left over the water for a period of time and exposed to environmental agents. The shape taken by the color is then recorded by some sort of photograms. Within the book, the resulting images are organized with text, archival images, and other pictures by the author so to form a narrative that aims to emotionally link the various scales of our material reality.
