BIOGRAPHY

Marianna Magurudumian‑O’Reilly is an Armenian-Russian-British multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, textile art, mask-making, performance, video, sound experiments, and design. Grounded in surrealist intuition and cross‑pollinating between media, she transforms spontaneous marks and found materials into evocative narratives of memory, identity, and the subconscious. Her work has been exhibited internationally - in London, Paris, Moscow, Tortosa, and beyond - and is held in major collections including Unilever HQ and Eurostar in London, and the Museu de l’Ebre in Tortosa, Spain.

Born in the USSR to Russian-Armenian artist parents, Marianna Magurudumian‑O’Reilly spent her childhood immersed in her family’s studio, learning to think laterally and build three-dimensional architectural structures alongside her father. Growing up under the rigid constraints of Soviet rule - and witnessing its political and economic hardships - she found freedom and solace in art, dreaming of new possibilities even as a teenager. After excelling at art school, Marianna earned a place at the prestigious Stiglitz Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in St. Petersburg at just eighteen, where she studied interior design and architecture. Drawn back to painting, she moved to the UK, winning solo exhibitions and top honors, including successive Winsor & Newton Young Artist Awards, the full Wingate Scholarship (the Royal Academy of Arts, London). Despite her commercial success teaching masterclasses and selling out galleries, she longed for deeper experimentation.

Marianna returned to full-time painting, completing a BA (Hons) First Class at the University of Brighton in 1999 and then a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2002), where she was funded by the Wingate Foundation and collaborated with leading artists on ambitious shows.

Over the next fifteen years in London, Marianna expanded into video, set design, writing, and digital media - co‑founding The Unstitute, an artist‑run digital laboratory inspired by Kafka’s surreal architecture, which hosted residencies, curated international video art exhibitions, and staged performances (including a centenary salute to Surrealism at André Breton’s house in France).

In 2016, amid the upheaval of Brexit, Marianna relocated to Catalonia with her family. Today, she continues to exhibit widely - most recently her multimedia solo Studio Grotesque at Museu de l’Ebre in Tortosa - and hosts the monthly bilingual radio show Arts and Culture Hour with Marianna on Top Cat Radio, spotlighting the vibrant creative scene of Baix‑Ebre and Barcelona.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"My practice unfolds within a space where material, memory, and the subconscious converge. I create works that invite viewers into a dreamlike dialogue - a terrain where fragments of textile, paint, found objects, and digital media intertwine to unlock hidden narratives embedded within everyday surfaces. Through intuitive mark-making and surrealist techniques, I embrace chance, allowing spontaneous gestures to reveal stories concealed beneath the visible. Stains, creases, and discarded scraps become hybrid figures, landscapes, and architectures.

Blending analog and digital practices, I move fluidly between hand-woven masks, layered collages, painting, performance, and video experiments. Each medium informs the next, cross-pollinating and expanding the possibilities of visual language. My inspirations are rooted in both personal and collective geographies - memories of winter forests in Karelia, the dramatic mountains of the North Caucasus, and my Armenian-Russian heritage - infusing my work with themes of identity, resilience, and ancestral survival.

At its core, my practice is process-led: I trust the materials to guide form and meaning. Every stain, fold, or accidental mark holds the potential to become something unexpected - a portal into an unseen story. Through these layered surfaces, I invite viewers to pause, linger, and reimagine the familiar, discovering the extraordinary in what might otherwise be overlooked.

My work also engages with feminist discourse and the intersection of personal and political histories. Through embodied practices, I explore joy, power, and resistance within feminine expression, reflecting on art’s capacity to transform vulnerability into agency. My current projects extend these explorations by merging performance, mask-making, and digital media into immersive, hybrid experiences that blur the boundaries between self and other, reality and dream, past and becoming.

Ultimately, I aim to create spaces of wonder and reflection, inviting viewers to journey through layered worlds of image, memory, and sensation - to witness how intuition, imagination, and material can together shape new possibilities of meaning and being." Marianna M-O, 2025