Iva Gueorguieva by Dona Nelson

Mark-making as the practice of touch

Featured in BOMB magazine's July 2, 2025 Women by Women, a series of interviews between women visual artists

Iva Gueorguieva, Animal 16, 2025, acrylic and gauze on canvas, 65 × 60"

I met Iva Gueorguieva in the summer of 1996 when I was briefly acting chair of the painting department at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. I was at school on a hot summer day when Iva dropped by to check out graduate studios. She told me she had majored in philosophy at Goucher College and asked me how to go about applying for graduate school in painting. I told her she would have to get together a portfolio of drawings and paintings. In 1998 she was accepted to Tyler, where she could always be found in her studio, drawing continuously, as she still does, even when we talk on the phone. 

When thinking is freed from its attachment to either intention or objects, it runs like a river. - Iva Gueorguieva

In 1996, I moved from Tribeca in New York City to Germantown in Philadelphia. After Iva graduated, she and her husband, Matthew McGarvey, also moved to Germantown, where Iva and I continued our conversations about art—fabulous, winding conversations that have become ever more intense and important to me as the years have gone by. Iva has since moved to Los Angeles, and this interview took place in her studio in one of the oldest buildings in the city. Walls were blanketed with Iva’s richly complex muslin and canvas paintings, which also covered the floor and hung from the ceiling. 

To read the complete interview, please visit BOMB