Archive Iva Gueorguieva

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Iva Gueorguieva Home Page | Fall 2007 Archive

Project Series 34: Iva Gueorguieva
 

	Iva Gueorguieva Olympia

For almost ten years, Iva Gueorguieva has been painting strikingly beautiful abstract canvases with a foreboding undercurrent of agitation and drama. For the artist, painting consists of an emotive and sensuous experience framed in a conceptual and philosophical structure. Grounded in a firm grasp of modern art history, philosophy, and contemporary painting, her interests center around the absurd, the grotesque, caricature, and universal conditions of humanity: beauty, sex, violence, death. Olympia and The Dead Matador—created specifically for the exhibition on view here—represent the fullest expression of her painting to date.

Gueorguieva chooses feeling over reason, intuition over calculation, and the subjective over the objective. Like Romantic artists of the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries, she responds to the sublime and the gothic. And like her Romantic predecessors, Gueorguieva’s work takes an expressionistic and dramatic form, reflecting her state of mind.

Gueorguieva is also deeply invested in the history and practice of painting. She finds herself drawn to artists who successfully linked the philosophical, literary, and artistic concepts of the absurd and the uncanny with virtuosic painterly technique. Honore Daumier, George Grosz, Otto Dix, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya are all sources of inspiration with their powerful artistic expressions of raw emotion. Gueorguieva also responds to artistic strategies found in early modern art, in particular Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and German Expressionism, that paralleled her own: the fracturing of multiple spaces, the layering of simultaneous multiple narratives, and the liberation from a pre-Modern, or Renaissance, space.

Another core influence is the 19th-century painter Edouard Manet, who is often credited as one of the first artists to shift modern art towards a representation of the reality of the everyday world. Gueorguieva studied Manet in depth in graduate school, and came to feel an affinity in the way he handled paint, how he dealt with color, and his choices of subject matter. Gueorguieva titled her Olympia of 2007 after Manet’s iconic Olympia of 1863 to honor his attack on 19th-century bourgeoisie mores and sensibilities. Like the confident courtesan boldly confronting proper society in Manet’s painting, the forthright, unapologetic imagery in Gueorguieva’s painting represents an attack on the complacency of the 21st century. And while Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864) is bloodless and immobile, Gueorguieva’s Dead Matador is brightly colored, tempestuous, and physical.

In conceiving this Project Series exhibition, Gueorguieva envisioned two enormous paintings as bodies confronting each other across the gallery—the viewer caught between the two. To complete the installation, she conceptualized a series of drawings related to the iconography of Olympia and The Dead Matador. More linear, often collaged, and frequently black and white, her drawings distill imagery derived from the paintings into more intimate moments of reflection. The new drawings enhance the concept of the paintings in communication with each other. They represent mementos and characters from the experiences depicted in the paintings.

Iva Gueorguieva’s exhibition is the thirty-third in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator