Iva Gueorguieva Exhibition
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe
This event has ended.
The sculptures were produced through a series of residencies at Graphicstudio in Tampa, FL. Gueorguieva worked with found metal, epoxy clay and various printmaking techniques. The sculptures are titled “Cosm” 1-5, as in “microcosm” or “macrocosm.” The titles point to encounters with variable-dimension worlds. Each piece traverses a terrain that is both physically present and illusionistic, a smeared dichotomous zone, which Gueorguieva has explored extensively in her collaged paintings and works on paper. The sculptural works are a natural step in a practice deeply involved with the productive tension between the materiality of paint and support, and the possibility of illusory or “only-perceived” space.
Gueorguieva first started experimenting with cutting and collaging the surfaces of her paintings in order to explore the shallow yet real space produced by the cut and the glued edge. Subsequently, in a number of works on paper, she began by removing most of the material, revealing a lattice or a system of tendon-like elements. These works hovered on the wall, producing real shadows as part of the composition. Shadows are problematic in the history of painting. For example, in the Middle Ages there was a prohibition against painting them because of their association with the demonic. In contrast, the Impressionists immersed themselves in not only painting shadows but also exploring the fullness of their color and vitality as a way to access actual experience. In Gueorguieva’s work, the real shadow insisted on pulling away from two-dimensional space into three-dimensional space, and she proceeded to create armatures that could support the fragments of painted and printed images. She chased the images, away from the wall, into the room. Or she made the skin of the paintings new and weirder bodies, to allow them stranger expressions.
The “bodies” for the “Cosm” sculptures are made of metal scraps with different origins, but all carrying the scars of time and the erosive power of the Tampa climate. Each sculptural body suggested a very specific mood, scale and space and therefore called for color and image unique to its conditions. Gueorguieva created etching and litho plates for each body in order to generate appropriate collage material to be worked over the metal and the thin layers of epoxy clay. The surfaces were further complicated by meticulous painting on top of the collage material, blurring the line between the real or sculptural space and the perceived spaces produced by the painted mark.
The “Cosm” sculptures are surrounded by a series of small paintings whose vertical format echoes the figurative character of the sculptures, placing the two distinct types of object in dialogue. Upon close inspection one can observe that a number of fragments from the etchings and litho prints have migrated to the flatter space of the paintings.
This migration posits a certain question as to the nature of the image. Perhaps all images seek surfaces in order to fully come into being. And if that is so, perhaps the wider the range of structural apparatus, the wider the species of images that might be snared, or the wider the world in which they can fly and circulate.
Media
Schedule
from April 23, 2015 to May 23, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-04-23 from 18:00 to 20:00