Press Release

NEW ORLEANS---Heriard-Cimino Gallery presents Prefiguration, a new series of paintings by Iva Gueorguieva. The exhibition will be on view October 1 - 29, 2011. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery for the Art for Art’s Sake celebration in New Orleans, as well as for the opening of the New Orleans Prospect.2 Biennial. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 5, or by appointment.

Throughout this new series, Iva Gueorguieva’s turbulent paintings possess indefinable, fragmented shapes colliding with energetic force, merging and expanding, producing highly-charged, compelling environments. Gueorguieva continues to incorporate drawing onto the canvas throughout her new series, creating a complex kaleidoscope of imagery. Shadowy phantoms among the shapes suggest undercurrents of arousal and slumber.

In the two large collage paintings, Gueorguieva slices canvas, inserting large swaths of torn paper drawings, pieces of fabric, and ribboned strips that swirl across the painting. The effect is lyrical, elegant and contrary to the driven compositions. The densely painted works suggest a compelling urgency, the depth and multiplicity of space suggest worlds we can barely imagine. Gueorguieva’s paintings are emotional and operatic, and consistently exude a mysterious wisdom.

In 1989 Georguieva and her family left Bulgaria just after the collapse of the government, initially moving to Baltimore. In 2002, she moved to New Orleans for three years, leaving just two months before Hurricane Katrina. During her time in the city, she taught painting and drawing at LSU and Tulane University. Gueorguieva states that the paintings in this show came about from a direct and conscious effort to reconstruct her memories from her life in New Orleans. The exhibition includes four tall vertical paintings reminiscent of doorways, a number of which are named after real people from the artist’s past. She explains that within these doorways phantasms made of bits of architecture, flesh, traces, spaces and events like a stain, a smudge, a tear, a spill, invade or disappear, pulling the viewer along.

Iva Gueorguieva received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a BA in Philosophy from Goucher College. She has had recent solo shows in New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam and has shown her work in notable group exhibitions throughout the U.S. Gueorguieva is the recipient of the California Community Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship for 2010, and the Pollock-Krasner Grant for 2006. Iva lives and works in Los Angeles, California. This will be her third solo exhibition at Heriard-Cimino Gallery.