The bookish IvaG

An artist's life is where art lives. It's a life for art to be. The life of an artist is art.

Iva Gueorguieva, Painting As Action, 2025, published by Bradwolff & Partners, Amsterdam

I have found that there tends to be one of two ways people look at a painting: (1) a focus in; or (2) a focus on. Those who focus in tend to keep it about the picture. Those who focus on will wander beyond the edges. Focus in is about place and content. Focus on is about space and impact. Both are important. But each lends a move on to the next painting in a much different way. Focus in resets. Focus on builds. And I don't think they ever really find the same purpose.

I would argue that most artist books are for the focus on. There are pages with words that might have nothing to do with the painting on the page next to it, and often feature the voice of others who have little to do with the actual making of the stuff that's earned the showcase. So focus in tends to flip and skip while focus on dog-ears the page. It's difficult for a book to be everything to everyone when you condense a life, a studio, gallery shows and museum recognition to a pixelated surface at a paginated pace. My betting odds favor the focus on for a purchase at full price.

There are of course those exceptional artists who do manage a way to engage the focus in AND on with a book. Ed Ruscha and Louise Bourgeois recently come to mind. And I believe that happens when it's not just a book about art but a book about a life as art. Iva Gueorguieva's recently published Painting As Action is just such a book.

Granted, I had the distinct privilege of contributing to Iva's book, so I naturally think its awesome. But regardless how you approach it or the time you lend it, you will immediately see the kind of life it takes to make great art. Simply looking at the pictures will tell the story. The finer print will enrich what you see.

Born 1974 and raised in Bulgaria, an unknowing desire to see a world Iva knew existed beyond the communist skyline motivated a creative curiosity at a very early age. Trees provided kaleidoscopic canopies, mountains shaped landscapes with scale and weight, gymnastics trained the discipline of a rhythmic core. Photographs triggered smells in the tempo of time caught still. Animals echoed an ancestral folklore. Iva learned to see the story of each day to find more than what the prevailing realism would allow. They are memories of color and glitches. A restless permission to act.

"Her paintings have an unusual quality of time. Marks are wild and fast, but the overall paintings are slow, quiet, displaying a thickened quality of time." - Dona Nelson

A move to Baltimore in 1990 imposed a nowhere place on a life then immigrated and detached. But the chance to join the Baltimore School of the Arts quickly followed. And as she struggled to learn a new language while cast an outsider, she discovered a kindred spirit in writers and other artists who helped her find a voice. An MFA in painting at Tyler in 1997, her first show at the Louisiana Biennial at the ICA in New Orleans in 2003, and a move to Los Angeles in 2005 would eventually lead to a bicoastal career stretched across galleries and museums from L.A. to NYC to Amsterdam. It's been a life of struggle and pain, triumph and recognition, loyal to the strength of family and friends but still battled against labels and norms. It's a life not always artistic, but always in pursuit of art.

"It is not the artist's task to remake the world, but to create space for something to be revealed" states Iva. That is the life of an artist as art. And Iva's is a life for art to be.

"This space for evolution and transformation is at the very core of her practice -- a dynamic process that remains ever open to change, resonating with the interplay of intention and spontaneity. Her work reflects the balance between structure and fluidity, between the known and the unknown." - Christine van den Bergh

Many thanks to Christine van den Bergh and her team at Bradwolff & Partners for their support, direction and exceptional execution in the making of this book.

Learn more about Iva Gueorguieva and where you can see her art by visiting her website, her blog or her IG