Night Gallery is pleased to present The Big Picture, a group exhibition featuring twelve contemporary painters whose expansive gestural, material, and conceptual ambitions play out on a large scale: Radcliffe Bailey, Sarah Blaustein, Andrea Marie Breiling, Nigel Cooke, Márcia Falcão, Iva Gueorguieva, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Carrie Moyer, Robert Nava, Kaveri Raina, Hasani Sahlehe, and Janaina Tschäpe. The exhibition will be on view at Night Gallery North from November 11 through December 22, 2023.
Both participating in and expanding the history of abstraction, multiple artists in The Big Picture demonstrate the evolving influence of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting while also developing their own inventive techniques for removing the artist’s hand. Andrea Marie Breiling renders kinetic works of abstraction using spray paint, an unexpected medium that has become her signature. Sweeping marks invoke the artist’s full body, as complex layers of color establish an ethereal tone. Sarah Blaustein repurposes tools of domestic labor for her artistic practice, using household items such as sponges, brooms, buckets, and housepainters’ brushes or rags to apply ink and acrylic paint to canvas. The process becomes what Blaustein has described as a “bodily dance” in which she attempts to capture momentary sensations and achieve a meditative state. Kaveri Raina paints on the front and back of stretched burlap, allowing pigments to bleed through the material’s textured surface. The resulting overlapping shapes appear as ominous shadows or maps of mysterious psychological terrain.
Artists such as Iva Gueorguieva, Nigel Cooke, and Janaina Tschäpe blend mediums and forms, often combining elements of abstraction and figuration. Integrating materials such as gauze on her paintings’ surfaces, Gueorguieva looks to the materialism of Art Povera, the physicality of Gutai, and the playfulness of Cubist collage to create works layered with palimpsests and partially visible images. Cooke subverts classical painting techniques of spatial depth to create works that convey the complexities of brain circuitry, human anatomy, and the natural world, while Janaina Tschäpe’s dreamlike paintings similarly blur the lines between aquatic, plant, and human forms, referencing her interests in mythology and biological morphology.
Other painters use the medium to generate abstracted depictions of places and the complex histories they contain. In paintings composed of bold lines and blocks of bright color, Atlanta-based artist Hasani Sahlehe draws upon his experiences growing up in the Caribbean and the improvisational approaches of Black musical traditions, visually translating a charged tension between repetition and rhapsody. Radcliffe Bailey, who also lives and works in Atlanta, mines his own family history to pursue broader inquiries into Black history and cultural expression. In Bailey’s monochromatic black painting Maroon—which incorporates materials such as Georgia clay and black sand—the shapes of ladders, oars, and other objects subtly protrude from the canvas while evading outright visual recognition, an apt metaphor for the obliqueness of the past. Painting with solid gestures and thick paint layers, Márcia Falcão articulates relationships between the female body and pictorial matter. Her central motif is the carioca suburbs where she grew up, lives, and works in Rio de Janeiro. She depicts fleshy bodies in tangles of brown and red, merging the unruliness of her figures with the structured grid of the canvas.
Veering from abstraction toward narrative, other artists reimagine stories from folklore and mythology—whether from received traditions or their own invented worlds. Robert Nava is known for paintings of fantastical creatures in acrylic, oil stick, and graphite pencil in blunt, kinetic lines, overlaid with spray paint. These creatures merge mythological characters that have persisted over millennia (gryphons, dragons, and witches, among others) with impulsive contemporary flourishes (airplanes, buses, electric currents, flamethrowers). Nava’s monsters offer new archetypes of the present day, intuitively combining ancient folklore with the mundane machinery of twenty-first-century life. In The Invocation of Queen Mab, Carrie Moyer celebrates a figure described as “the fairies’ midwife” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet who would, in later representations, be portrayed as “the queen of the fairies.” Showing fiery washes of color descending from two dome-like shapes above a glittery grayscale sea, Moyer’s painting brings a sense of the theatrical and a distinctively feminine perspective to a medium and scale that have often historically been associated with macho bravado. Informed by comic books, cartoons, and film, Trenton Doyle Hancock has developed his own fantastical universe known as the “Moundverse” across works in painting, sculpture, and other mediums. In Bringback Condiments: Ketchup, Hancock depicts characters known as the “Bringbacks,” mouthless, fur-striped humanoids who serve a nostalgic function: they "bring back" memories from childhood. For Hancock, the Bringbacks allow him to revisit formative influences on his creation of the Moundverse.
Across this range of styles and subject matter, the paintings in The Big Picture assert each artist’s own distinctive visual language. What unites these works is not aesthetic, conceptual or technical, but a spirit of unbridled ambition. Through each of their idiosyncratic approaches, each artist asserts that there is still space to explore within the enterprise of painting.
GAVLAK: IVA GUEORGUIEVA POMPEII GRAY October 26 - November 20, 2022
Iva Gueorguieva: Pompeii Gray
October 26 - November 20, 2022
GAVLAK is proud to announce Pompeii Gray, the gallery’s first solo presentation of the work of Los Angeles based artist Iva Gueorguieva. The exhibition showcases three sculptures alongside seven new, ambitiously scaled works in acrylic and collage that mark Gueorguieva’s return to the stretched canvas after a three-year immersion in the making of unstretched and at times double-sided tapestry paintings. The genesis of the Pompeii Gray works was her sudden decision to paint over a massive, colorful abstract painting from 2017 with white gesso and washes of gray. Gueorguieva’s new paintings are works in low relief: layers of muslin, gauze, and pigment combine to blur the difference between the raw edges of strips of fabric and the illusionism of a painted line. Variegated layers of gray form a miasmatic haze that hangs over strata of bright colors and agitated lines that churn beneath the surface to reveal flashes of figures, human and animal. Like the bodies uncovered in the centuries-long process of excavating Pompeii from its blanket of volcanic ash, Gueorguieva’s compositions invite speculation about the relationships of the creatures embedded in the dense layers to one another. Though originally compelled to strip her work from the stretchers, Gueorguieva’s act of generative destruction ultimately inspired her to reconceptualize the canvas as a site of possibility and discovery, like the framed sieve of an archaeologist sifting through the layers of history. Pompeii Gray opens October 26 and will be on view through November 20, 2022 at GAVLAK Palm Beach.
To behold And She Cried for the Weekend (2021) is to experience the pleasure of uncovering fragments—buoyant breasts, splayed limbs, and rangy digits—that appear to combine in a scene of conjugal bliss. This sensation is quickly eclipsed by the unsettling possibility that the human figures rendered in anxious, wiry line as a writhing, undifferentiated mass are engaged in violent rather than orgiastic activity. Fingers that initially seemed arched in erotic tension over the belly of a lover now appear to be clawing through layers of gray and bruise-purple viscera. A Slow Congress Under Heavy Gauze (2021) similarly binds the carnal with the moribund; pink and blue aurorae shimmer beneath a shroud of gray to highlight a couple locked in eager congress. Yet the ashen palette and the gauzy texture produced by layers of muslin swaddling the surface of the work mummify this scene of passion and render our curious prying perverse. Wrapped in Animals and Fears (2021) corrupts even the sweet contentment of relaxing with an animal companion, as the stiff figure of a hollow-eyed hooved creature splays in a suffocating posture over where the neck of a vaguely human figure ought to be.
The exhibition also features three sculptures from Gueorguieva’s “Talisman Debris” series, which informed her initial impulses to abandon the constraints of canvas stretchers, as well as the omnivorous approach to different media manifest in her latest work. Gueorguieva salvaged hunks of concrete and twists of rebar from a Tampa demolition site and from these humble fragments fashioned compositions that exude a surprising, buoyant liveliness. Vanished Animal 3 (2015) lofts bright tatters of intaglio prints on fabric on a twisted steel scaffold, balanced precariously on a concrete island in a manner suggestive of migration and ruination. Inspired by her own family’s immigration histories, in this series Gueorguieva alludes to the natural and manmade disasters that prompt us to leave life as we knew it behind. In considering the human and animal subjects of Pompeii fated to share their last breaths and long afterlives together amongst the ruins, Gueorguieva envisages the interpersonal exchanges we perform in the thick of unfathomable disaster. The tender gestures of people frozen at the moments of their demise take on a particular sharpness in the contemporary context of a global plague that compels individuals to sacrifice physical closeness as an act of collective care. The companions who cling together within these compositions are at least not alone, and the beauty of their bonds is undiminished even in their wretchedness.
Iva Gueorguieva (b. 1974, Bulgaria) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations for UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2021; 2020); Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2018; 2016) and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2016; 2015; 2014). Her work featured prominently in recent group exhibitions including L.A. Louver, Venice, California (2022; 2018); David Lewis Gallery (2020); and Sophia Contemporary, London (2018; 2017).
Intersection: Transformative Arts September 8 - September 17, 2022
La Louver presents: New Work September 21 - October 29, 2022
Brand Library, Glendale, CA June 2022
Benton Museum At Pomona College, Claremont, CA May 2022
The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College will be the site of an ambitious large-scale installation and performance by the painter and sculptor Iva Gueorguieva in collaboration with the actor/dancer/director/choreographer Emma Portner…
"Knot", a group show, including a series of performances curated by Iva Gueorguieva at MIM gallery
October 1st – November 27th,
Opening on Friday, October 1st from 6-9pm
Group exhibition, “Knot”, including a series of performances
For more on the exhibition, click here.
Bradwolff Projects "What Am I Looking At?" Exhibition Featuring Iva Gueorguieva
IVA GUEORGUIEVA: Pompeii Gray Paintings and The Tapestries
Philip Martin Gallery Group Exhibition: From Morning Til Night, We Should Never Rely on a Single Thing
Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, “From Morning Til Night, We Should Never Rely on a Single Thing," a group exhibition curated by Los Angeles-based painter, Tomory Dodge. The title of the exhibition, a quotation attributed to 9th century Zen teacher Huang Po, advocates an approach to the everyday that does not rely on preconceived notions and concepts for understanding, but rather seeks to meet each occurrence on its own terms — to simply follow circumstances.
UTA Artist Space Group Show - EMERGENCY ON PLANET EARTH: IN A TIME CLOSE TO NOW Oct 2020
UTA Artist Space Featuring Iva Gueorguieva May 2020
"Constellation": group show at David Lewis Gallery, NY
UTA Artist Project
The Light Touch, Group Exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, September 7 – October 19, 2019
Yaddo
Yaddo residency May 2019 / https://www.yaddo.org