Iva Gueorguieva

Iva Gueorguieva

Iva Gueorguieva

52 5 We s t 2 2 nd S t r e e t N e w Yor k N Y 1 0 0 1 1 t e l 2 1 2 4 4 5 0 0 51  www. a my- ny c. com

I believe that the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder. —Werner Herzog

Foreword Robyn O’neil There’s structure, and then there’s this. This explosion of everything.

Are these pools? Reflections? Stars? Shooting stars? Sunrays? Other things? Bars and pillars and bridges and oceans. Simple lines. Scratched lines. Projected bullets and sweat stains. Two dead friends. Maybe even three. Our odd behavior trying to rest under stern structures. Is there celebration?

Detonation with no redemption, an anatomy of chaos. Ekphrastic creation derived from everything. This is that. This and that and back and forth, and this summons us into a circular prison. The process of nonstop. Everything digested and everything examined.

Some sort of executive council meets even when you are sleeping, whispering into your ear extractions of noxious data. You provide your summaries in sweeping, frozen, hurt moments. That pond stays constantly in the wind. There’s no room for a field. There’s no room for a mountain. And in this spot, little pea pods grow out of cracks, because you presided over the sunrays. But do you want this to function so well?

This one has sentences, parts of Donald Barthelme. This one spits up Derek Jarman, with his breath on our faces. Another one is heating up to an Ervin Nyiregyházi crescendo and drowns in layers of nerve after nerve trying to be tamed. House, child, husband. All of these are realities.

Expansions of something infinite housed within those walls. And it’s all pounding, burning.

You’re not exactly cursing, but you’ve shouted through that entire race. Epic trauma haunting each move. Do you remember the woman who fell from that roller coaster? Her children in the seat behind her? And this, while your enemies chased that man through every street of your city. You know Repulsion. You know what floats in that ocean. You can see Gargantua climbing amidst your trove. And it is a trove; do not be fooled. Back to those pea pods.

But what is it about chaos? Doesn’t it comfort the few? It drinks in others, and then everyone drowns. Some things are still standing, but you can’t count on much. Have you ever seen a highway after an earthquake? Have you ever seen a city after an explosion? Has your heart ever stopped?

Robyn O’Neil is an artist living and working in the Los Angeles area.

“…the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection.”

—W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“There are no dead, hard, limited objects. Everything diffuses beyond its limitations, and lasts only for a moment in a particular shape in order to leave it at the first opportunity.”

—Bruno Schulz to Debora Vogel

Iva Gueorguieva: Time Present Time Past 9

Elizabeth Frank

Iva Gueorguieva’s new paintings and sculptures virtually explode with transformative energies. To describe her surfaces as stained, brushed, cut, collaged and marked barely begins to do justice to the ceaseless, restless, searching ways in which she dips into a deep reservoir of technical skills and resources that she handles with passion and assurance.

The origins of her art lie in another world, one that has virtually ceased to exist and yet bears the traces of an ancient civilization little known in the West. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1974, when no one on either side of the Iron Curtain could register even the faintest tremor of the sudden collapse a mere fifteen years later of the Eastern Bloc’s communist regimes.

Gueorguieva was a visually and intellectually precocious child.

Her parents recognized and encouraged her gifts. By the time Gueorguieva was two, her mother, at the time a medical student and later a pediatrician, was making up and telling her long spun-out stories without beginnings or ends, and letting her daughter look at the beautiful color illustrations and diagrams in her medical texts. The future artist loved to “bubble”1 the words in these books, that is, fill in, with a pen, on page after page, all the “closed” letters, such as “a” and “o” and “p” (“r” in Cyrillic).

From the age of two, Gueorguieva obsessively made pen drawings of a single figure: tall, human, with buttons larger at the bottom and smaller at the top, indicating her instinctive grasp of height and proportion. A little later she loved to do UNICEF jigsaw puzzles, with their bright, complex images of art by

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children. She was equally taken with the natural world: the way sand looks when it’s being poured from a pail, or leaves dappling the ground with light and shadow. She loved to look at patterns, the fractal-like blocks, for example, on the granite floor of a bathroom. Wallpaper mesmerized her with its repeating forms and “glitches”—sites where the wallpaper was interrupted by cuts and seams and edges, in other words, where predictable sameness was violated by abrupt difference. As a second-grader she attended an after-school program where she made large-scale collages, directly cutting the images without drawing them first.

During Gueorguieva’s childhood, it’s true that art was, to some extent, constrained by the doctrines and conventions of Socialist realism, what the great Bulgarian poet Valeri Petrov, in conversation some years ago with this writer in Sofia, once ironically characterized as “academic art in bad taste.” Nevertheless, not every communist regime was alike, and in Bulgaria, both film and the visual arts had more wiggle-room for individual talent than is generally supposed. Of particular importance to Gueorguieva was that Bulgaria’s communist regime “never tried to erase the past.” Thus she grew up surrounded by Sofia’s many fascinating Roman and Byzantine architectural monuments and stone fragments. Bulgarian Orthodox icons—austere, solemn, elegant, inherently abstract—could be seen in every church and monastery, including Sofia’s golden-domed St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Color and pattern, omnipresent from time immemorial in Bulgarian folk arts, can be seen in textiles, articles of domestic use, and regional costumes worn for narodni tanci, or national dance, a living and much beloved tradition in this Balkan country.

Under communism in Bulgaria, abstract art was not necessarily forbidden. In Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city and a long-established cultural center, the abstract and semi-abstract paintings of Georgi Bozhilov, known as “Slona” (“Elephant”), for the most part eluded state recognition, yet won him wide admiration in the larger world of Bulgarian culture. Even so, Bozhilov’s work was not such an anomaly. Small countries can have large aesthetic aspirations. Decades before the communist government was established in Bulgaria in 1944, an accomplished tradition of both nineteenth-century academic and emerging modernist art flourished in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities. It was not unusual for Bulgarians to study abroad, in both France and Germany; landscape and portrait painting by Bulgarian artists demonstrated a thorough assimilation of the Barbizon School, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and beyond, as

in the Fauvist portraits of Bulgarian peasant women by Vladimir Dimitrov—“Maistora” (“Master,” 1882–1960). As a child, Gueorguieva saw examples of his work in Sofia’s National Museum of Art (once the tsar’s palace). In the 1920s, communist poet and painter Geo Milev (who had studied in Leipzig and followed German Expressionism) edited the journal Plamuk (Flame), in which he published avant-garde poets, writers and artists from Russia, Western Europe and the United States.

After Milev was garroted in 1925 during a police interrogation, the journal ceased to exist, but avant-gardism was not eradicated in Bulgaria; it merely went underground.

During Gueorguieva’s childhood (and still today), Bulgarian children with recognized aptitudes were sent to specialized, prestigious high schools. Gifted in math, Gueorguieva was slated for the mathematics gymnasium in Sofia. But the teacher who ran the after-school collage program had taken note of her visual talent, and insisted to her parents that she go instead to the High School for Applied Arts. There, as a textile major, and under a teacher who was herself an established textile artist, she was introduced to implicitly “subversive” aesthetics: she saw, for instance, how the ancient designs of Bulgarian rugs were woven with abstract geometric and semi-abstract animal motifs. She saw too how textiles incorporated elements of Cubism and Bauhaus design. Wall hangings were “like paintings in yarn,” she recalls.

The one clearly repressive feature of the communist regime was that for almost all ordinary Bulgarian citizens, travel abroad was severely restricted. Gueorguieva’s parents were unusual in that they often traveled and worked in foreign countries. In 1985 Gueorguieva herself accompanied her father, a flight engineer, to Zimbabwe, and later to Sri Lanka. Her father went several times to Vietnam, and her parents together visited Cambodia, where they filmed the Angkor Wat temple complex.

From Africa and Southeast Asia her father brought home objects that Gueorguieva found utterly enchanting. His suitcase, filled with postcards, masks, carvings and statues, were, in the words of the great Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, “redolent. . . of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities.” As a child, Gueorguieva would dust these objects, and she remembers a mask “with big chunky teeth,” each curve and crevice burrowing into her memory.

She remembers too her grandfather’s house in a beautiful ancient village, now a suburb of Sofia at the foot of deeply

forested Vitosha Mountain, the southern bookend to the Sofia plain bordered to the north by the Stara Planina (“Old Mountain”), the Bulgarian name for the Balkan range. Her grandfather had been an engineer, and he put his house together, as so many Bulgarians still do, with his own two hands and with what Gueorguieva recalls as a “hodgepodge” of materials. In fact, she observes, “This house was a threedimensional collage that my grandfather took apart and changed continuously over the years.”

Throughout Gueorguieva’s childhood, her mother would take her on excursions to Rakovska Street in downtown Sofia, then as now teeming with galleries, theaters, cafés and bookstores, including the still-flourishing open-air book market, Slaveikov Square. It was through books that Gueorguieva fell in love with the Daumier-esque drawings and caricatures of Ilia Beshkov (1901–1958) and Chudomir (1890–1967), both celebrated in Bulgaria for their visual wit and virtuoso draftsmanship.

The forty-five year Bulgarian communist regime imploded in November 1989, when Gueorguieva was fifteen. But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to “Western-style democracy”: “the complete breakdown,” Gueorguieva remembers, “of an entire social and political order.” People of good will, among them Gueorguieva’s father, who had yearned for, welcomed, and now participated wholeheartedly in the “Democratic Changes,” were appalled by the insolence, arrogance, greed, hypocrisy and corruption of the kleptocracy that swiftly took control of the country and has, in one way or another, ruled it ever since. Thousands of people fled Bulgaria in disillusionment and disgust.

So, just around Christmas 1990, Gueorguieva and her family arrived in the United States, eventually settling in Baltimore.

Her English was rudimentary, but she attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, where materials and equipment were free, and she could take photography, sculpture and video as well as painting. She frequently visited the Walters Art Museum and saw for the first time Renaissance paintings, works by followers of Hieronymus Bosch, and Japanese prints. At Goucher College, rather than majoring in art, she studied philosophy, because, she explains, “I wanted to learn how to ask better questions and how to think.”

Studying for a master’s degree at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, she discovered, as she candidly puts it, that she was “behind” in her awareness of modern and contemporary

art. Somehow she hadn’t yet been exposed to American postwar painting—the grand sweep of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Minimalism and points beyond. One of her teachers at Tyler, the painter Dona Nelson, would take her students to the museums in New York, and what Gueorguieva saw was nothing short of a revelation. She took in, at just the right moment, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Lucio Fontana and Philip Guston, and, not to put too fine a point on it, they knocked her socks off, rocked her world. She responded to virtually everything she saw, especially Abstract Expressionist processes and aesthetics, with omnivorous curiosity and visceral understanding. With exponentially increasing sophistication she absorbed as well what her other teachers, Stanley Whitney, Margo Margolis and Frank Bramblett, imparted to her. She also followed suggestions of fellow students, among them Trenton Doyle Hancock, who encouraged her to use cartoons and caricatures in her paintings—elements put to great effect in his own work. She learned by heart the collections in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she worked as a curatorial assistant, “spending many hours,” she recalls, “looking at Duchamp’s large glass and other works and the Cy Twombly Iliad paintings.” She developed a number of deeply personal enthusiasms, the paintings of Warren Rohrer and the abstract geometry of Gees Bend quilts among them.

After completing her master’s degree, and needing time to digest what she had learned, Gueorguieva moved from Philadelphia to New Orleans. “It was a great place to become a painter,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t be the artist that I have become if it hadn’t been for that experience. New Orleans is the most culturally vital and alive place I have ever been.” Essential though it was to her development, New Orleans turned out to be one more stop on her journey. Leaving two months before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, she eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she has lived and worked ever since. _______________ Gueorguieva has never looked back. Like so many millions before her, she has gone through the archetypal transformation that turns an immigrant into an American. Yet from Bulgaria she brought with her an incalculable and inexhaustible treasure: the seething, churning, fermenting compost of memory and image that has only grown richer over time with the constant

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admixture of all that has happened to her since she left her native land, particularly postwar American art. In their extraordinary, exuberant and even riotous “muchness,” her works bear witness to a probing sensibility given to rigorous problemsolving and powerful expressive urgencies informed by a deeply knowledgeable art-historical consciousness. Yet this consciousness is not, as it was with high modernism, the actual subject of her work. Indeed, what distinguishes Gueorguieva’s second exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is not simply her brilliant and continuing grasp of modernist abstraction in both her paintings and sculptures, but the self-trust with which she allows feeling to hold sway. She has found the perfect fit between her emotion and the material techniques and conceptual resources of American painting from 1945 to the present. Yet her work manages to remain not only completely free but actually indifferent to the “formalist” dogmatism of the 1940s through the 1970s. Instead of subordinating herself to the then-vital but now-tedious prescriptions and prohibitions of the AbEx paradigm, she swims like a dolphin in the possibilities of various modes of abstraction for the sake of her own interior imperatives alone.

The modernist “rules” insisted on reductiveness, “flatness,” the rejection of illusion and the privileging of the “framing edge.”

But we can see in the show’s centerpiece, the suite of four recent 80 x 80 inch paintings (Detroit Phone Book, Morning View, Suitor and Wave) that her work is joyously additive and proliferative, with countless hints of illusionism and perspective playing through the interstices of deep and shallow space, and visual incident that appears to continue beyond the so-called framing edge. In the sharp-edged, sometimes glass-like piles of “shards” within her paintings, we witness her engagement with the fractured and fragmented facet planes of Analytic Cubism, interrupted with hints of figuration, as in the insertions of an evocative Matissean female figure in the lower register of Suitor or the witty little picture-within-a-picture on the upper right of Morning View; yet she is not so much involved with breaking down pictorial logic as she is with interweaving visual fugue and counterpoint. Her free-associative, stream-of-consciousness and “automatic” gestures evoke Surrealism as they travel from one passage to the next, suggesting something approaching narrative but stopping short, as serious abstraction does, of actual reference. In the stained canvas areas of her paintings— the color often delicate, almost transparent—she acknowledges the diaphanous seductiveness of Color Field technique, but she

always slams it up against her fierce need to draw, to define contours, indicate edges and inscribe marks without necessarily delimiting closed shapes, her drawing sometimes tending toward a cartoony Basquiat-like vernacular that thumbs its nose at “high-art” pretentiousness.

Above all her paintings and sculpture seem to fuse her personal history—the space of memory, desire, and even violent, angry, destructive emotion—through her ongoing immersion in modern and contemporary “issues.” When she paints cut strips of cloth that she pastes to the canvas, her response to Cubism fuses with her early experience with collage, and in this sense she is “in” her painting as surely Pollock was, with total physicality and presence.

Her paintings and sculptures are always in motion. Every stroke, every line, every drip and accent and cloud of color moves in multiple directions and turns into something else, as if churned by great winds. Whether tilting, floating, sinking, rising—often doing all of these in one painting—her visual vocabulary achieves a complex integration in which she welcomes conflict, as if different voices within her work were contesting each other for dominance. Again and again stained, collaged and drawn passages (and this holds true for her sculptures as well, with their conscious engagement with Tatlin and Constructivism) enact a polyphonic battle of visual opposites: What is soft, melting and curvilinear rides up against what is sharply defined, finely edged and enclosed. Occasionally a cartoon-like figure appears and almost dissolves and then reasserts itself as in the near-grisaille surface of Dual Ablutions, where a sensual De Kooningesque shape is possibly holding a smaller figure (perhaps a mother and child?) within the angled planes and the soft warm grays and beiges of this tender, human-scale work.

We can detect as well in her paintings, in fleeting analogies, the Surrealism of Matta and Masson, the sublime grandeur of Still and the sexual, organic vocabulary of Gorky—another immigrant from a land that, like Bulgaria, lies uneasily at the crossroads of East and West. Gueorguieva’s biomorphism, however, is always offset by the assertiveness of the geometric angles, lattices, ladders, and hatchings that interrupt and counter the floating haze and blur of her softer passages.

In the studio, she works on multiple paintings at once, and at different stages, so that she can take advantage of every shifting mood. She lets nothing go to waste, as it were.

The total configuration of a Gueorguieva painting or sculpture

is both a physical and psychic palimpsest, layering over and simultaneously revealing the multi-dimensionality of her feeling and process. Her surfaces conjure up bodies and body parts, aggressive and tender physicality, eroticism, aggression—the range of human emotion. A woman’s breasts, a suckling child, a hint of the phallic: All swim in the oceanic plentitude of her imagery, which can instantly turn into menace and threat—the broken, the collapsed, the knife-edged, the weapon-like. The rhythms of “creative destruction” and unstoppable emergence— like those in Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”—can be felt in passages that seem to pound and throb with primordial forces. The scale of a painting may shift internally: multiple clusters of small, sharply drawn forms are enveloped by lunging curves, pillars, big structural anchors that suggest the heroic and the monumental, shifting configurations that evoke interior, psychic cities tumbled and churned by whirlwinds of line and color.

At the same time she includes islands of tranquility or even isolation within, under or beside piles of tumultuous disturbance.

A volcanic passage erupts and spews a lavalike cascade of shapes, then subsides to pools of gray and violet serenity. In this way the kinesthetic also becomes the synesthetic: “When I look at dance, I see drawing,” Gueorguieva explains. And when she draws, the viewer sees and feels dance. In her sculptures, for instance Swindler and Saw Ripple, the physicality of the armature suggests the human skeleton, the way the vulnerable, ingenious

body is put together with bones and joints and encased with skin that can be both cut and bandaged.

A painting may start with a simple mark on a canvas, but she sees each one through to its own self-articulated conclusion and answers its every call, no matter where it leads her—into paradox and contradiction and ambiguity, if need be. Hers is a totalizing vision, inclusive, encyclopedic, rejecting nothing.

Bringing together her past world with her present one, finding no impulse of hand or eye and therefore no part of a painting too small or unimportant to leave unworked, tolerating and even welcoming breaks, interruptions and disjunctions, she gives her work the absolute freedom to be itself, endowing it with boundless vitality and uncompromising aesthetic necessity.

That she has the courage of her epic imagination hardly needs saying. And she isn’t even out of her thirties.

Elizabeth Frank, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1986, is a member of the literature faculty at Bard College. A novelist and translator, she has also published books on Jackson Pollock and Esteban Vicente. Since 1999 she has spent every summer in Sofia, Bulgaria.

1. All quotations of Iva Gueorguieva are from two sources: a telephone conversation with the artist on August 16, 2013 and an email exchange on September 12, 2013.

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1

Bathers 2012 Acrylic, collage, and oil on canvas 77 x 100 inches  (195.6 x 254 cm)

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Sun Juggler 2012 Acrylic, collage, and oil on linen 40 x 55 inches  (101.6 x 139.7 cm)

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Scarlet Squall 2012 Acrylic, collage, and oil, on linen 80 x 80 inches  (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

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Voyages in a Stone 2012 Acrylic, collage, and oil on linen 80 x 80 inches  (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

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Talisman Debris: Shield 2012 Acrylic, collage, paper, muslin, and wood 81 x 35 x 5 inches  (205.7 x 88.9 x 12.7 cm)

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Dual Ablutions 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on linen 55 x 40 inches  (139.7 x 101.6 cm)

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Facet Moon 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on linen 55 x 40 inches  (139.7 x 101.6 cm)

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Murmuring Swordsman 2013 Acrylic, collage, pastel, and oil on canvas 96 x 77 inches  (243.8 x 195.6 cm)

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Mast Womb 2013 Acrylic, oil, collage, paper, linen, muslin, wood, steel, and wire 114 x 68 x 22½ inches  (289.6 x 172.7 x 57.2 cm)

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Suitor 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on canvas 80 x 80 inches  (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

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Morning View 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on canvas 80 x 80 inches  (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

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Detroit Phone Book 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on canvas 80 x 80 inches  (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

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Wave 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on linen 80 x 80 inches  (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

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Swindler 2013 Acrylic, oil, collage, paper, linen, muslin, wood, and wire 90 x 34 x 23 inches  (228.6 x 86.4 x 58.4 cm)

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American Vortex 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on canvas 87¼ x 71 inches (221.6 x 180.3 cm)

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Relocation 2013 Acrylic, collage, and oil on linen 50 x 50 inches  (127 x 127 cm)

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Women and the Ocean 20 13 Acrylic, collage, and oil on canvas 65 x 120 inches  (165.1 x 304.8 cm)

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Saw Ripple 2013 Acrylic, oil, collage, paper, linen, muslin, and wood 58 x 96 x 30½ inches (147.3 x 243.8 x 7 7.5 cm)

Where to Find Beautiful Monsters Iva Gueorguieva in Conversation with David Louis NOrr

Iva Gueorguieva’s large-scale paintings blur distinctions between abstraction and figuration, drawing and painting, the internal world and the external one. Her works display a rigorous engagement with color, line and form, along with a canny and reverential mix of approaches to painting. In various combinations, we find Frankenthaler-like washes and blotchy color marks reminiscent of Cézanne, intimate tangles of line and collage meandering through hidden pockets of pictorial space.

These are vibrant works that knowingly channel the excesses of Neo-Expressionism and the time-warping intensities of Futurism. Gueorguieva’s works present us with a particular approach to painting bolstered by a polyglot vision of the world. Perhaps above all, her works demand that we confront

“abstraction,” however shrouded that term may be in misleading histories, as a working method grounded in materiality and movement.

The Latin verb abstrahere means to “draw away” or “remove.”

Contemporary usage asks us to consider instances or things made independent of their context. “Abstraction” is a compelling word because it suggests thought itself, as well as perception’s reach and the outlying areas of consciousness. It melds “traction” with “subtraction.” And while “abstraction” connotes removal, it also suggests action and process. It refers to our understanding of the world and our use of language itself. It names the moment one fails to synthesize new knowledge with existing knowledge, as in, “that’s still a little abstract to me.”

The word carries the threat that a certain new knowledge may strike at any moment.

Gueorguieva’s abstraction is the opposite of withdrawal. Her paintings engage us in an active state, where nothing is static or fully formed, but everything is in constant movement.

David Louis Norr: One could suggest that painting often structures the viewer’s relationship to subjects through the staging of space within its field—like the foreground and background. But your works make these distinctions difficult, if not impossible. Can you talk about how you stage space in your works?

Iva Gueorguieva: Many years ago, I was deeply taken by Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the possibility of multiple simultaneous narratives. I no longer remember the details, and it doesn’t matter since it’s the residual influence in the peripheral field of my thinking that’s operative. I always start the paintings by setting up some rather abstract field, but with very specific procedural underpinnings. At this point, I think of the minimalists and serial painting in particular setting up procedures that function to carry the painting on without too much intent. Within that field, a number of possible entry points emerge. If you take de Chirico’s multiple perspectival spaces and amplify their number until the point when you get tired of keeping track, you can see how this works. Each offers a way to organize the picture plane, making it possible to have multiple levels of the basic relationships you describe, i.e. figure/ground and foreground/background.

Possible subjects come forth or disintegrate based on your level of attention, and on the angle of your approach. As I construct the space, I find ways to keep every point where things come together in flux. Any possible vanishing point is deconstructed, causing a perpetual fluctuation between flat surface and deep illusionistic space.

DN: Perhaps the question is really one about your approach to abstraction, which appears opposed to the photo-based abstraction of painters like Luc Tuymans or Wilhelm Sasnal.

Your approach resonates more with Futurists’ and Cubists’ attempts to harness motion and multiplicity. You’re not moving away from a subject but moving toward it …

IG: What you have at hand in painting is line, color and form acting as agents within the field of the canvas. It’s abstract

from the start. The spatial and temporal effect of these elements’ interaction is always mysterious and unpredictable.

What I have added is the field itself as an active participant.

By cutting and collaging, I want to relieve the surface of its passive role as a recipient of marks and perform its plastic character. There is a back and forth between sensing something as a whole, let’s say thinking of Los Angeles as an organism sprawling horizontally, and then letting that understanding disintegrate into its opposite, into a multiplicity or into sets of possible or impossible juxtapositions. Manipulating the field itself means, among other things, that that horizontal sprawl can start stacking vertically. How can a city march upwards? It becomes a beautiful monster.

DN: I always think about your paintings in relation to your drawings. There were often static subjects and characters in the drawings, whereas your paintings put everything into motion.

IG: Early on, I used to make smaller cartoony and narrative drawings exploring stories or situations or events that I wouldn’t have the guts to do in the paintings. The initial attempt at figuration in the painting happened around 2005 or 2006. The characters remained small and tentative. It was a way to think about the drawings and search for a reason to make a painting.

I had an idea about bringing abstraction to the level of the day to day, the mundane and material. I felt disconnected with the loftiness and transcendent/sublime quality of much of the history of abstraction. Characters like cops, gas-masked rabbits, etc. subverted the largely abstract motions and spaces.

Upon closer inspection, what appeared as an elegant abstract gesture would in fact describe a genital or an exploding airplane. That matters, because to ridicule a cop or a body is to confront through absurdity the overwhelming force of power or of bodily desire.

DN: You’re suggesting a relationship between what drives the physicality in your work and what is ultimately represented as a subject …

IG: You can do absurd things via these narrative moments.

And in some way, they can provide a relief for the viewer. The paintings become a space where the figures “do things.” This fact of doing provides content. It satisfies the need for a subject.

One can locate the image as a response. It all becomes comprehensible. But it seems much harder to make an abstract painting,

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because it’s much more difficult to find a reason for abstraction.

It’s harder to understand.

Abstraction for me presents the possibility of confronting structure, the systemic inflexibility of force. But this structure can be met only through the body. And for that reason, in my recent paintings, the figure is the fullness of space. The figure is the space. In the Cut drawings [part of a concurrent show of works on paper at BravinLee programs], in the literal removal of the surface, the drawings become an oscillatory accumulation of cuts and grafts of fragments. The drawing becomes a tangle of tendons, rather than skin. … In that tangle, structure is revealed. There is something there about the tension in the structure: It’s a tendon map. If the drawings are this kind of intricate web of tendons and tissue, then the paintings add meat and intensify these connections. For example, the recent Crooked Men drawings lack any readable figuration. Yet their overall shape, structure and gesture echo that of a human body. The figure is the space. A painting such as The General: In the Garden is a further complication. The structure of the painting follows the motion of the gesture, the intent and destructive motion of the general. He is not an image, he is a web of forces unraveling, cascading and gestating. The organism as a machine and the machine as an organism capable of desire and procreation.

DN: This tension between automatic and organic accrues in the removal and the layering of materials, like a kind of call and response. Your recent use of collage is involved in this kind of echo.

IG: The recent collage pieces are made of muslin, which is at times pre-dyed and pre-painted. It serves to double up the surface— since the pieces are already patterned, colored, textured, and then since they get laid on in specific forms, the second surface paints the first—but it’s still surface. What’s interesting about this is the inevitable slippage between those surfaces, the inevitable mistakes, and wrinkles, the uncontrollability of the fabric compared to the brush. And yet the fabric often mimics the brush and acts as a faux expressive mark, which up close is actually a rather clunky, ripped or cut piece of fabric. Maybe you could even say this means there’s a kind of glitch that happens, necessarily, in the viewing process.

DN: That glitch in viewing follows after glitches in the making process itself, like the pouring of paint. I’m thinking of your painting The Birds and wondering how that composition developed.

IG: The paintings almost always start with an automatic move, or with a certain element of mistake. In this case, it was raw canvas with transparent gesso, which I tint. I was thinking of Ellsworth Kelly. Looking at his work, I was always on the brink of understanding something, and yet failed. So the painting began with a large Ellsworth Kelly-inspired shape outlined in pencil, which was then painted in green surrounded by blue.

I was thinking of Kelly, and yet I ended up with a biomorphic awkward green shape. If you can reverse liposuction and pump flesh into a geometric shape, you will get there. Just totally messing his image up on every level. The painting begins with a kind of mistake or a misread, which I then have to wrestle with.

DN: That’s always a question that painters ask, how to let awkwardness in. Both your drawings and your paintings seem to be about honing in on the awkward decisions and harnessing them. Maybe in the drawings the awkwardness is allowed a more direct expression, without an insistence on a full working through of the space.

IG: The awkwardness allows a degree of letting go and acceptance. I’m often embarrassed to tell what the paintings actually have to do with. For example, A Tree Thinks of Tumbling came about as a vision of a tree with four swings or pods flying up in the air, drenched in yellow light reminiscent of Serrano’s Piss Christ and the scene where Sarah Connor in Terminator I looks at a playground and sees a future of atomic holocaust in which that very same swing is burning.

In the past, I would only let this conjunction of thought come out in the drawings. Now that conjunction is central to my formal decisions. I picture myself as a bear in order to find new formal possibilities.

DN: There is a violence in many of your works, and also a tension between where something is and where it is going to be. Perhaps the violence is in the apprehension of that shift.

Somehow, this brings up film—though I hesitate to relate your works to film, in that your paintings never allow for an ending.

I mean that the movement doesn’t stop. It’s as if all the frames

of a film have collapsed on top of themselves into a kind of Kino-eye collage-montage.

IG: Yes, the paintings are much more about film than photography.

The limitation of film is that it has a linear relationship to time.

Paintings can unfold endlessly, both spatially and temporally, without constraints. They don’t have to stop or ever resolve. I think that the great filmmakers understand that and try to bring this painterly potential to the making of films. Take Kubrick for example. He really suspends time and lets the eye linger even as the frames keep going. He resists the narrative and temporal rush of the moving image.

DN: Perhaps this still has to do with time, but the more I look at the Grown Child series of paintings, the more I’ve begun to see the series as a compressed, time-lapse portrait of gestures between two bodies.

IG: The Grown Child paintings are direct responses to the Crooked Men drawings. The singularity of the men with their stilted posture, as though constrained by the wall of a coffin … these outlines are substituted with the space between the legs of the seated mother. The rectangle as container is replaced by a triangle oriented in space. There is a welcoming opening where the child can find room. These paintings are more and more about affirmation and longing for another human presence.

From there, a self portrait became an inevitable step—thus I as Bear. I realize that I have really needed to think about my body.

The Grown Child series has a lot to do with the gesture I make toward my son, Neven. How I look at him, how we look at each other. How I’ll look at him in twenty years and how he’ll look at me. It took a long time to get the Grown Child paintings out of my system, but when I did I wanted to think about my own body and how I approach my own body. It’s the exploration of skin, but also putting some formal decisions in question. To start with the skin or the fatness of my thighs is kind of antithetical to the drawings I’ve been making, which explore the understructure or the tendons. So this

painting is starting to have a different kind of space, whether it’s conscious or not, because my focus is on the skin and the fullness of flesh.

DN: But there’s still some narrative aspect. A collapsed narrative, or a compressed one …

IG: I am deeply distrustful of grand narratives. There is always a lie there. Even with the simplest story, there seem to be a million ways to tell it, and I am never entirely sure about what is true or not. So I am distrustful about narrative, whether it’s about me or politics.

It doesn’t come from relativism. It’s much deeper than that.

I think that there is the possibility of some truth. But truth, especially in representation, doesn’t have to do with constructing a cohesive narrative. It’s more about questions and ways to produce juxtapositions or sequences of relationships.

DN: Are you suggesting that somehow painting has failed, maybe implicitly, with regard to representation?

IG: I guess I deeply mistrust identity. I think that it is something you surrender to. Some may criticize me for saying that. But when I move very quickly, in one painting, from the fatness of my thighs to the gesture of how I sit when I ask my son, Neven, over to play with me, I think it gets all tied together in some sort of intricate and complex set of relationships. And that’s what I’m really interested in with the paintings. That all this is constantly shifting and mobile yet has a history and does actually exist. Things change, but they take place in time. So painting can reflect that intricacy. Like rich dog shit. It’s a kind of production of relationships. Sometimes the paintings can have almost an aerial view, but it’s not that I’m interested in maps.

David Louis Norr Chief curator MOCA Cleveland

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Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 Tel 212-445-0051 www.amy-nyc.com 30 January – 8 March 2014

Iva Gueorguieva Publication © 2014 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Made in the USA Catalogue designed by Dan Miller Design, New York Printed and bound by Puritan Capital, Hollis, New Hampshire Photography of the art by Tom Powel, New York Studio image © 2013 Gene Ogami Cover: American Vortex (detail), 2013 acrylic, collage and oil on canvas 87¼ x 71 inches (221.6 x 180.3 cm) ISBN 978-0-9850184-8-1