Maria Nitulescu
Photo: Valentin Morariu. Pietro Canonica Museum, Rome, exhibition The Factum.

Bio

Maria Nitulescu (*1989, Bucharest) is a Romanian-German interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, and writer who lives and works in Berlin since the end of 2013.

Nitulescu has a focus on olfactory art as a way of thinking and understanding the world. For her, smell is a vocabulary that has accompanied her since youth, quietly shaping how she approaches memory, place, and cultural identity.

Painting became her first language when she joined her school art club at the age of three. This was followed by studies at the Nicolae Tonitza Art High School in Bucharest, a B.A. at the National University of Arts Bucharest, an M.A. in Creative Communication for Cultural Heritage at the Brera Academy in Milan, and a postgraduate degree from the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), where she wrote her thesis on olfactory art and involuntary memory under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jörg Heiser.

Her practice draws on painting, printmaking, photography, glass, sculpture, and installation, with scent as a recurring material and medium. She does not see this as a move away from the visual, but as a layering of all her senses and skills. The invisible, what is felt rather than seen, has always been central to how she works.

Her relationship to olfaction goes back to childhood summers in the Transylvanian countryside, where the scent of hay, plants, and open fields quietly settled into her memory in a way she could not yet name. At seventeen, she had an olfactory dream, something rare, in which she could actually perceive fragrance within a dream, a memory she has never lost. That experience stayed with her, shaping her curiosity about scent as something far more than aesthetic. It was perhaps this sensitivity that led her, years later, into a sustained exploration of perfumery, through an ongoing collaboration with master perfumer Geza Schön and through her own independent, self-taught research, culminating in the past two years in the development of her own fragrance accords for her artworks.

Since 2014 she has contributed regularly to international art publications, including The ArtGorgeous, SLEEK Magazine, and Positive Magazine. Alongside her writing, she has developed curatorial projects across Europe, including Contemporary Infinite (2018) in collaboration with FIAC in Paris, presenting a public sculpture by Gregor Hildebrandt in front of the Grand Palais, and Beyond the Forest (2019), shortlisted for the Venice Biennale competition for the National Pavilion of Romania.

Apart from her artistic practice, she has a deep passion for perfume, with over 30 fragrances in her personal collection and counting.

Education

Selected Exhibitions

Solo

Group (selected)

Selected Awards

  • 2025: Candidate, Art and Olfaction Awards.
  • 2019: Second Place, National Competition for the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (as curator and project coordinator).
  • 2013: Award for Artistic Creation (Premiul pentru Creație Artistică), Gala of Academic Excellence, League of Romanian Students Abroad (LSRS), Bucharest.
  • 2011: Certificate of Participation, 9th Painting Prize PalauArte, Sardinia.
  • 2006: Award of Praiseworthy, Nicolae Tonitza Art School, Bucharest.
  • 2001: Gold Medal, International Meeting of Juvenile Art (Encontro Internacional de Arte Infantil), Évora, Portugal.
  • 2001: Silver Medal, Shankar’s International Children’s Competition, Children’s Book Trust, New Delhi.
  • 1999: Gold Medal, Premio Internazionale di Pittura “Città di Belluno”, Italy.
  • 1998: Foreign Minister’s Award, 28th International Children’s Art Exhibition, Japan. Selected from 64,000 artworks submitted from around the world.