The Gyre Carling

After a breakout solo exhibition at the Carl Berg Gallery in 2005 and subsequent solo exhibitions in New York and Amsterdam in 2006 Iva Gueorguieva will open her highly anticipated second solo show in Los Angeles in March. The exhibition will feature several works on paper, five new large-scale paintings including her most ambitious work to date; a monumental panoramic painting that measures 94 x 220 inches. Through her continuous exploration of the painting medium she has created a new body of work that expands well beyond her already formidable oeuvre.

Gueorguieva’s painterly gesture has a multilayered intensity. The viewer is initially pulled into the painting by color and movement and then boomerangs as lines mutate insinuating something of figures and landscape. Her paintings are explosive and apocalyptic and often include large swirling forms that convey a sense of agitation, energy, and foreboding. The paintings begin as large washes of color, which eventually linger as deeper recesses. Gradually, the paintings move toward specificity stopping just short of clarity with everything suspended at the point of becoming.

In these new works Gueorguieva is exploring different surface qualities and her painting technique creates varied visual effects that play on her abstract figurative content. The different grounds (or surfaces) she works on allow for varied subject matter where some paintings are more abstract and atmospheric while others are more figurative. As a group the paintings reveal a cryptic narrative through a combined surreal, expressionist and abstract articulation.

Gueorguieva was a 2006 Pollack-Krasner Grant recipient and in the fall of 2007 will exhibit a solo project at the Pomona Museum in Claremont (concurrent with James Turrell). Later this year she will participate as a guest lecturer at Painter’s Edge in Idyllwild. In 2005 Iva attended the Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture.

She has recently exhibited at: Stephan Stux Gallery in New York, Western Project in Chicago, Sampson Projects in Boston and Carl Berg Projects in Amsterdam. Gueorguieva is a favorite among top collectors and her paintings have been placed in collections both nationally and internationally.