Iva Gueorguieva

Gallery Affiliations: Angles Gallery

Region: Pacific Coast

Painting has the ability to slow down time. I love looking at and feeling the space before me stretch and twist. I make the painting I want to see, and I paint in order to see.

As first glance, my paintings appear abstract. Large-scale strokes produce vertiginous and fast-paced tracks for the eye to move along. The tracks ascend, twist and collapse at multiple junctures. Various marks–sharp-edged, calligraphic, serial–draw out spaces that both retreat and advance, producing spatial ambiguity and tension. While abstract, the strokes at times become recognizable images, but the integrity of the figure is continuously compromised, invaded and penetrated by the ground.

We assume that painting means revealing. We perceive that act of painting as the accumulation of descriptive strokes that provide visual information. Yet every stroke conceals as much as it reveals. The strokes that get buried remain potent, both narratively and formally. Each final painting is a sort of collision of imagistic diary entries, not unlike a wall that has been graffitied over and over again. Each compiles a period of time complete with feelings, thoughts and actions. Ultimately, these temporal series solidify into on complex relation of spaces.

Featured on the NAP/Blog:
February 12, 2014