Born in Bulgaria, Iva Gueorguieva emigrated to the United States in 1990 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Goucher College in Baltimore and her M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she studied painting.
In Gueorguieva’s large-scale, abstract paintings, dizzying brushstrokes, loud colors, complex spatial configurations, and frenetic energy abound. Vaguely recognizable objects, dismembered body parts, hints of architecture, and obscure characters—grotesque, comic, even pitiful in their tattered states—are barely revealed and even seem poised to disintegrate. Yet they all come together, curiously juxtaposed, on canvases heaving with lurid hues, swirling spaces, and sharp-edged marks to depict seemingly futuristic worlds where an underlying sense of menace lurks. It is the process of painting that Gueorguieva makes evident in these chaotic, exuberant works. But as she bleeds abstraction into narrative, despite the absence of any static image, tales of beauty, violence, isolation, sex and death are revealed.
Her solo exhibitions include shows at Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Outline, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Electric Works, San Francisco, CA; Pomona College Museum of Art in CA; Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Heriard Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; and Stephen Stux, New York, NY. She has been a part of group exhibitions at Ben Maltz Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas, TX; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; Angell Gallery, Toronto, Canada; and Sampson Projects, Boston, MA. She teaches drawing and painting at UCLA.
www.luxartinstitute.org/Artist-Residency/Iva-Gueorguieva/
