A painter of manifold turbulence

Nouns and adjectives go a long way to describe works of art, but the turbulence within Iva Gueorguieva’s paintings demands verbs — lots of verbs. Shapes billow, pulse and scatter; lines thrust and plummet; colors collide, dissolve, shriek and sigh. The paintings engulf the body. They send the eye skittering.

Motion, change and transmutation abound, but some also see violence in the work.

“I’m fine with it,” Gueorguieva says, after some thought. “I think the word is quite complex. There is this swirling, big motion that does feel kind of violent and threatening, like fast-moving clouds or really heavy rain. The forces and directions and pushes — everything is always in a continuous state of becoming, and there is a violence to becoming.”

The flux in Gueorguieva’s paintings might seem wholly abstract, conjured by an artist who, at 35, enjoys the stability of a steady run of exhibition opportunities (the next, locally, at Angles Gallery’s new Culver City space in April), teaching gigs at UCLA and Claremont Graduate University, as well as a house, husband and young son. But turmoil has had a real presence in her life and has become the defining condition of her work.

Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Gueorguieva was two years into the traditional curriculum at an academy of applied arts in 1989 when the communist government collapsed and with it, her inborn sense of order. “The whole society fell apart,” she says, seated on a cardboard box in her downtown studio, sipping tea on a chilly December morning.

To read Leah Ollman's "In the Studio" feature in Arts & Books, click here.

Photo credit: Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

 

Comments

[William Wray]

A cornucopia of protoplasmic forms that are based on reality distorted. I think Iva Gueorguieva's strength is the sense of values, drawing of forms that are breaking apart in a controlled hurricane. A nostalgic reflection of Kandinski meets Duchamp. This is an example of how abstract art can benefit from some knowledge of the basics. Who knows how good she would be if she got 4 years of school?

[Donald Frazell]

Its OK, but rather hakneyed, been done many times before. Better, but always room for quality. Her colors are feminine, but I know a woman who is much better from Iran, whose dark rich co9lors are of a womans torn heart and life, having lost all her work, her life in Iran, her husbands death, with a much more intense feminine yet strong sensuality named Armineh Teimourian. If she doesnt get deported before a show, she should go to Jancar Gallery which I have encouraged her to do, they promote women modernists, and she is a modern, this more academic post modernism, missing the structure and revleation of our world in true exopressionsit work.

But thats not whats in now, distractions from reality rule the day, and personal drama, which is truly irrelvant, It is what is common to us all, what defines us as human that counts, not the individuals trials and tribulations, art types watch tomany soap operas. Artists create myths that allow us to see ourselves, a common mankind, to feel it, to know it instictually, a highly developed instinct not the Pavlovian responses of the academies.

art collegia delenda est