Bio

Mariandrie (b. 1989) is a Cypriot artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends painting, installation art, and textiles to challenge societal preconceptions, particularly around gender, and to foster fresh perspectives. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Art, Lancaster University (UK), and an MA in Visual Arts in Education from the European University in Cyprus. Mariandrie has participated in artist residencies across the globe, including Arthaus Lab in Cuba as part of the 2019 Havana Biennale, Memeraki in Cyprus, Phoenix Gallery in Athens, and Schafhof European Art Forum in Germany. Her work has been showcased in two solo exhibitions at The Edit Gallery (Cyprus) and Phoenix Gallery (Athens) in 2022, as well as numerous group exhibitions in galleries, museums, and art fairs across Cyprus, Greece, the UK, and Cuba. Notable group exhibitions include Contemporary Womanhood 1.0: Present Femininities at Alex Mylona Museum in Athens, Cyprus Insula: History-Memory-Reality at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation in Nicosia, and Repetitive Acts at NiMAC in Nicosia. Her artworks are featured in private collections and the prestigious State Gallery of Cyprus. In addition to her artistic practice, Mariandrie has actively contributed to the arts community as an art teacher, museum educator, gallery assistant, and exhibition curator. She is represented by The Edit Gallery in Cyprus. She currently lives and works between Cyprus and Greece.

Statement

Mariandrie’s artistic practice is grounded in the fusion of opposing notions; male and female, self and other, rigidity and softness, past and present. By weaving these tensions together, she creates hybrid forms that bridge craft and fine art, challenging stereotypical binaries and offering inclusive narratives rooted in identity, memory, belonging, and cultural heritage.

Textiles, both inherited and self-constructed, form the core of her material language.  Mariandrie engages in acts of making, unmaking, and reimagining, by utilizing traditional techniques such as embroidery, knitting, and sewing, often in dialogue with text and unconventional materials. These gestures are not merely formal strategies but conceptual ones, positioning fiber, historically coded as feminine and domestic, as a potent metaphor for resilience, resistance, and reclamation. By subverting conventional textile methodologies, she repositions the medium within contemporary art discourse, unveiling its layered emotional, political, and historical resonance.

Her work moves fluidly between the personal and the collective, interrogating the gendered frameworks inscribed in color, material, and labor. At once intimate and assertive, poetic and political, her pieces reflect on the evolving landscape of contemporary womanhood, the unstable relationship between subject and object, and the persistent negotiation of gender roles in both society and art history. Color, scale, and composition serve not only as aesthetic devices but as critical tools that challenge normative perceptions and open space for more nuanced understandings of the human condition.

By crafting spaces where the individual and the universal converge, Mariandrie invites herself and viewers into a reflective dialogue on memory, identity, and connection. Her practice honors generational resilience while reimagining what it means to exist and to create, in a world still grappling with its inherited divisions.