I first connected with Iva Gueorguieva in July 2022. I had just come across an exhibition catalog for the incredible Warren Rohrer at the Philadelphia Museum. Iva had provided research for that catalog, and I recognized her name with some curiosity: how do such seemingly disparate artists end up becoming so perfectly linked? I reached out to Iva to learn more, beginning a year-long correspondence exploring everything from Bulgarian rituals to four leaf clovers. Iva has her first solo show in more than four years, opening June 22, 2024 at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. This excerpt shares a few of our notes back and forth divulging Iva’s unique motivations and musings that appear in her paintings. While difficult for Iva to share, we now have the opportunity to see so much more than what simply sits at the surface.
Patrick
Much of your work references the real vs the abstract. You state your paintings could not happen without the experience of nature. What for you is nature?
Iva:
In my native Bulgarian language, the word for nature is “priroda”, which translates to “with kin.” That’s how I see nature. It’s the ground and the weather. It’s a field and its energy. It’s why water has intelligence, and birds perceive magnetic fields, and wolves can change the behavior of rivers. The human species is just one of an infinite set of possibilities. Life is a rhizome.
My favorite activity is searching for four leaf clovers. I love looking at a field and finding that glitch. I am extremely good at it.
Nature is the glitch.
Patrick
So is it nature that connects us to your paintings?
Iva:
My recent paintings are dense reliefs constructed over many months with layers of gauze and paint. I build these surface terrains because I need to touch, and through this touch I recover, record and practice haptic memory. I have been calling most of my latest series of paintings either Snowscapes or Seascapes as a way to point to a surface that both reveals and conceals a depth. I also draw to record both personal experience and the movement of my hand on a surface. It’s at once diaristic and automatic, moments of intimacy I like to call “fragments.”
I think the reason people connect with my paintings is because of these fragments. Most like to see or discover the familiar like plants, other people, animals, etc…but these fragments I use, these buried drawings of stuff, also offer the viewer that simple pleasure of discovered recognition.
A good example is Kukeri: Devotion. I used cords, knots, layers of gauze, scratched marks, rubbings, holes… they relieve the eye of its domination. It’s full of contradictions.
Patrick
So does abstraction then no longer become a style but rather a surface for entropy, a playground for nature?
Iva:
I love that idea of abstraction as a playground for nature. Let's take the grid as an example. The grid as I employ it is related to my love of textiles and fabric. Growing up in Bulgaria I would help my grandmother launder our sheets and lay them back over the beds. I loved seeing the grid of large squares drawn out by the hard creases in the perfectly white field of cotton, and the way each thread repeated that same interlocking structure of vertical and horizontal lines. They posed as surfaces, but they were really very sentimental structured terrains bearing the weight of layers. And in those layers I saw time getting captured and bent, a grid in the real rather than from some notion of order or purity.
That’s the grid that structured my Pompeii Gray paintings. The surfaces are very layered and meant to appear fragile and dust-like. Their dryness is evocative with black lines that traverse and draw out the figures of animals and big breasted humanoid females. This way of looking helps me find the glitches, witnessing moments of both grace and deformity, layers and grids that distort both perception and time.
I actually started Snowscape: Excavation by painting over an older painting. I used cords of gauze to mark a series of parallel lines like a tailor measuring fabric. I thought about how Agnes Martin used string to guide her pencil, and Mondrian’s Seascapes with their undulating black marks advancing an intensely consistent force and rhythm. My gauze cords were drenched in paint and floppy, very hard to control. But they leave articulate imprints, what I call “recordings,” a reference I use for the consequential markings of the terrain by unencumbered materials. More recently I have been scratching with the wood of the brush directly on sheets of gauze or muslin laid over layers of gauze saturated with paint. The scratching records the interaction between various processes and materials, between layers and surfaces, recording the absorption and saturation and pressure of that moment. The same mark is recorded differently by each layer, so they are temporarily identical but spatially distanced. Collage iterates this further. It’s like passing down a story from generation to generation, a history colored in its discovery.
Patrick
In Snowscape: Grid, movement ripples forward advanced by folds across the surface. But the lower left corner is black and still…why?
Iva:
The black space, the void …I was compelled to do it. Something about all the gold iridescence of the rest of the painting demanded this harsh contrast, this unveiling. I was also thinking of ruins, the way missing facades reveal voids and hidden armatures become exposed.
Patrick
We also see Kukeri as a serial reference. Could Kukeri be your “Angelus Novus,” your past made eternal?
Iva:
Certainly. And that Klee reference to my work has come up before. The Kukeri tradition is ancient – and playful, upside down, irreverent, illogical, all my most cherished principles! – but also remade by each generation as a family affair. Ritual participants inhabit the skins of animals to become the Kukeri, and then dance and march through villages swirling in cacophonous exalted melees reminiscent of dervishes and Dionysian revelers. The paintings I name after Kukeri are very clear at expressing various thoughts and feelings attached to them.
Patrick
Have you ever started and finished a painting knowing throughout it would never be seen by anyone but you?
Iva:
I think I am a painter because I can remain hidden. I never think about the painting being seen or not seen. I just keep painting because there is something I want to see. I have lived in this country for 33 years, and for better or worse I’ve made a lot of effort to remain camouflaged and undiscovered. When I paint, I am very open which can actually cause me as much pain and harm as it does joy. It’s a continuous process, like wind moving through a room with open windows. The openness is the necessary condition.
Patrick
You make it clear that your drawings do not stand in deference to your larger works, they simply proceed or follow. Do your drawings exist to carry painting endlessly?
Iva:
My drawings are out of my control. They come with such strength but then they will disappear just as quickly. I can never force it.
But the truth is that I am terrified when I cannot draw. The Pompeii Gray paintings were preceded and followed by a torrent of ink and watercolor works on paper. But once the Seascape/ Snowscapes/ Kukeri series slowly emerged, every piece of paper I readied for my mark stood frozen and empty. I still needed to draw but I was unable to move in or out of what I had already made. Many were incomplete, and so they remained stacked and stuck.
But I did find their existence as stacks compelling, and I started treating my paintings in a similar way. Now I have stacks of similar sized canvases that I shuffle like a deck of cards as I work. This avoids the once common delay I can face when approaching a single work as something meant to be finished before moving on to the next.
And then I started drawing with ink directly on the large paintings, something urged by my friend Dona Nelson. She noticed that the drawing with black line that was central to the Pompeii Gray paintings had disappeared. I was shocked at her mention of this, but it was a huge learning for me. Suddenly I saw every painting in my studio as a surface, a terrain for drawing. I made Seascape: Riders in a frenzied trance that very night.
My recent drawings are the gradual transformation of tattered and heavily collaged surfaces, and they follow the “Seascape/ Snowscape/ Kukeri/ Butterflies” series. Some are so dense with material they resemble concrete and plaster. I’ve also started working again on unstretched muslin directly on the studio floor. The butterfly paintings are what lie beneath the carapace and Moth: Dappled Light was the first. I made Kukeri: Nocturne around the same time.
Patrick
So where will you go next?
Iva:
Color has returned to my paintings, but to obscure as much as to reveal. I’ve also been drawing with the residual and partially dried gesso left on the brush or I simply drag the brush across the canvas’s varied terrains and watch what becomes revealed in the process. This is how I gather new ways of seeing and recording to follow.
But it’s my most recent black drawings – Dona’s Fox; Black Elephant; the Night series like Crow – that promise the radically different way forward. I’m finding their density and opacity to be a new kind of structure that pushes the darting vectors of my drawn line to new revelations. They operate like neural responses to a vast new network of stimuli. So I follow.
