Maya Ashiniants — Linocut Berlin
artist
Maya Ashiniants
Maya Ashiniants cuts cities into linoleum. Berlin, where she has lived since 2014, comes out of her workshop one landmark at a time: the Brandenburg Gate, the water tower on Prenzlauer Berg, the cathedral, the long perspective of Schönhauser Allee — each reduced to the few black lines and one or two colours a hand-pressed print will allow. The series has grown to take in Prague's bridges and Dancing House, Bern and Hamburg's port, and it spills over into postcards, annual calendars and hand-printed cotton T-shirts, which is how a good many Berliners end up with a linocut in the house without ever having set foot in a gallery.
She came to the poster the long way round. A freelance graphic designer since 2004, she spent two decades on the kind of work that has to function before it is allowed to be beautiful: an identity system for the GULag History Museum, a corporate identity for the folk ensemble Polynushka, wayfinding and branding for a historic city district, and books — Irina Kholodna's “New Pastorals” and “Pictures for Alice”, a book of proverbs called “Beet”, and “Stereopair”, a photo book about Croatia made with Roman Ekimov. She also builds and keeps the online archive of composer Irina Manukian's recordings — the kind of quiet, unglamorous custodianship that says a lot about how she treats other people's work.
The poster proper arrived through Peter Bankov's poster school in Prague, where she studied in 2024 and again in 2025, and it is easy to see why the form suits her: the discipline of the linocut — decide what to leave out, then commit with a knife — is poster thinking in its purest, slowest version.
Why we like it: she makes the city you walk through every day look like somewhere worth a postcard, and then prints the postcard herself.
