Night Gallery is pleased to present Iva Gueorguieva: Seascapes, Snowscapes, Kukeri. This is Gueorguieva’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Gueorguieva paints the space between softness and resilience, layering materials and pigments with mark making that agitates the senses against contemporary atrophy. Her work is generous yet insistent that the viewer slow down and really engage with her dimensionality, tactility and materiality to experience the land and seascapes and the mythical creatures – kukeri*, Madonnas, apocalyptic horses – as well as elephants and other animals that are more than mirrors to human subjectivity. These inhabited presences are revealed and concealed through veils of gestures and abstractions.

Hauntings, warnings, secrets and dreams emerge in Gueorguieva’s painting, separated and joined together with gauze, thread, luminosity and density. She rejected the confines of the canon a long time ago to wholly embody her relationship with what lies between the cosmic and the organic, between the moon and the bottom of the ocean. Her work brings into proximity the knowledge that what is above is also below, that surface like true north is an illusion. Feeling is her compass, dissonance the canvas and memory the hand that unfixes our need for temporality.

These transmutations evidence a master storyteller and channeler of collective sensorial registries, codices, and lexicons. While Gueorguieva is influenced by the conceptual and historical frameworks of Lee Krasner’s forceful collaging, Lucio Fontana’s anti-imperialist counternarratives and Miro’s antipaintings, she sees Dona Nelson and Thornton Dial as spirit guides to her dance with other worlds. Nelson and Dial represent the spectrum on which Gueorguieva finds not balance, but buoyancy, allowing her to explore what it means to unearth narratives and feelings that transmogrify the canvas from gestures and colors to invitations and refusals.

Achieved through scale and depth, this openness to the speculative is not just perspective, but rather belief. It is a surrender to tidal movement, to Toni Morrison’s rememory, riding the ebb and flow of experience to create through ways that support survival. Gueorguieva offers these portals to decolonize us, subliming liminal yet wholly inhabitable worlds that immerse us in wondrous possibilities.

–jill moniz

*Kukeri: A part of ancient Bulgarian tradition, Kukeri are masked characters clad in animal skins and clusters of bells who dance in reverie and descend upon villages in a cacophony of noise intended to clear the stagnant spirits and open space for rebirth.

Iva Gueorguieva (b. 1974, Sofia, Bulgaria) has presented solo exhibitions and projects at Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam, NL; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, CA; ACME, Los Angeles, CA; Frederic Snitzer, Miami, FL; and Pomona Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. Notable group shows include: CAM, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is included in the public collections of museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA; Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA; Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY, and Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. She lives and works in Los Angeles.