visual artist | Armenia
Margarita Ivanova
About the creator
Margarita Ivanova
- Margarita Ivanova is an Armenian visual artist. She trained as an architect and has painted full-time since 2019. Her practice builds images through many overlapping layers of paint and drawing, an approach she calls palimpsest.
Short Biography
Painting has always been part of Margarita’s life. She studied architecture at the Academy of Architecture and Arts from 2004 to 2010 and then worked as an architect. Over time painting took up more and more of her life, and in 2019 it became her only occupation. Since then she has shown her work at international art fairs in Russia, Turkey, Greece and the UAE, including three consecutive editions of World Art Dubai. More than 500 of her works are now in private collections around the world.
Education
Margarita studied at the Academy of Architecture and Arts from 2004 to 2010 and graduated with a degree in Architecture.
Exhibitions
Margarita has exhibited widely at international art fairs and exhibitions since 2021. In the UAE, she took part in World Art Dubai in 2024, 2025 and 2026. In Russia, her work has appeared at the International Art Fair Rostov in Rostov-on-Don (2021), ART WORLD Nizhny Novgorod (2023), Art Russia in Moscow (2025 and 2026) and Art Russia Classics in Moscow (2025). In Turkey, she showed at the Artcontact International Art Fair in Istanbul (2023 and 2026) and the Elvira International Exhibition in Bodrum (2023). She also exhibited at the Thessaloniki International Art Fair in Greece (2024). Her work has been included in two international online exhibitions: ‘Human Nature’, with Colors of Humanity Art Gallery, France (2021), and ‘Light, Space and Time’, an exhibition of figurative art with Light Space and Time Art Gallery (2022).
Artistic Style
Margarita works across different media, building each image from many layers of paint and drawing, laid one over another like a palimpsest. Her thinking is rooted in metamodernism, also known as ‘new sincerity’. She describes her main method as ‘oscillation’, a constant movement between the inner and the outer, the personal and the collective. Her real interest is not the image itself but how we see and understand it. Her figures look like portraits at first, but they are meant to make the viewer question what they see. She draws on Michel Foucault’s writing on painting and on René Magritte’s surrealism, which plays with the gap between an image and its meaning. She sets aside traditional ideas of beauty and treats each painting as an object that viewers meet and interpret for themselves.
Additional Information
Margarita brings her background in architecture to her painting. More than 500 of her works are held in private collections worldwide.
Masterpieces by Margarita Ivanova
