Shows

Upcoming Exhibitions

FINE ART GUILD, NEW YORK, Dec 2022

DYNAMITE GALLERY, Brighton, Dec 8th 2022

Current & Recent Exhibitions

THE LOUVRE, Paris, France
1-4 September 2022

DYNAMITE ARTFAIR, Brixton, London, UK – Sept 2022

THE TRINITY BUOY WHARF Drawing Prize 2021 Exhibition & Tour

DYNAMITE ARTFAIR BRIXTON in London UK, March 2022

HALO MASTERPIECE SAATCHI GALLERY LONDON

HALO MASTERPIECE LOUVRE

SHIBUYA ART EXPO at CONTEMPORARY ART STATION TOKYO, Japan May 2021

‘FALL’ EXHIBIT GAME STUDIO
London, UK 2020

‘VANGUARD’ EXHIBIT at OUTRÈ GALLERY Melbourne, Australia 2020

DARK ART EMPORIUM, LA, CA, USA, Sept 2019

MODERN EDEN GALLERY
San Francisco, CA, USA
Representational Modern: Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize Exhibition, Jan 2019

DARK ART EMPORIUM
Dakuato + 12 Inches of Wood / Long Beach, California, USA, Feb 2019

FLUX London
FLUX Exhibition at The National Army Museum, March 2019

TOKYO International Art Fair
TIAF 18  |  TOKYO, Japan, May 2018

THE ARTBOX New York 1.0
Armory Artweeks in New York, USA. March 2018

FLUX London
FLUX Exhibition at The Chelsea College of Art, London, April 2018

MODERN MASTERS
Modern Masters Exhibit at Art Republic Brighton, UK, July 2018

COREY HELFORD GALLERY, LA, USA.
THE NEW ROMANTICS July 2018

COREY HELFORD GALLERY, LA, USA. May-June 2017.

IVA TROJ 4 FRIENDSHIP –
Friendship Vegan Apparel / Permanent Exhibit in Shoreditch, London, UK

THE CHIMERA GALLERY, Mullingar, Ireland, 2018-2019

COREY HELFORD GALLERY, CA, LA, USA
Beneath The Waves Group Exhibit, Jan-Feb 2017

RANDOM ART GALLERY
Contemporary Beast Exhibit, Brighton, UK, 2016

FED THE LIONS – DYNAMITE GALLERY
Solo Show at DYNAMITE GALLERY, Brighton, UK, April 2016.

MAYFAIR with Roberta Moore Contemporary in London, UK, May 2015

BICHARD-TROJ Collaboration
Exhibition with John Paul Bichard at ROYAL CASTLE, Stockholm, Sweden, Sept-Dec 2015

LLOYDS CLUB GALLERY London, Dec 2014

About Iva

Award-winning contemporary artist Iva Troj creates fine art pieces which seamlessly merge Renaissance aesthetics and techniques with postmodern praxis. Her intensely detailed images achieve astonishing tricks of light and shade, as practiced by the great masters while incorporating dreamlike scenes which challenge cultural norms. Exhausted by a society in which women often feel vulnerable, threatened, or powerless, Troj recasts the fairer sex as powerful creatures, freed from the oppressive male gaze and placed within Edenic settings where they can revel in their own beauty and potential. Blending abstraction with figuration, the natural world with the urban landscape, dream with reality, Troj’s breathtakingly beautiful artworks achieve something truly unique, both in terms of aesthetics and concept.

“In many ways, I am what you get when you throw ancient Sakar Mountain wisdom failing to adapt to totalitarian ideas right into the pits of post-industrial capitalism. My grandmother’s village used to be in the no man’s land surrounding the Turkish and Greek/Bulgarian border during the communist regime. It used to be totally isolated from the industrial world and there was no school or a library (or pollution). And somehow my grandma knew what Wabi-sabi was. I asked her about it and she told me a story about a lion tamer. Beauty is ”imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” she said. I am not sure how I came to find the clues to Japanese culture. She never talked about China or Japan, “intimacy”, or appreciation of the ”ingenuous integrity of natural objects”. That was not how she spoke. Instead of using fancy words she showed me things and explained their beauty to me. Her house and her garden were full of evidence of beautiful imperfection.”

In 2016, Troj was named Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year and, in 2013, was the winner of the Towry Best of East England Award. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and her work is in collections in the UK, France, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, China, United States and Japan. In 2020, two of her paintings were included in the permanent museum exhibit at Haegeumgang Museum 해금강테마박물관] in South Korea.

The painting technique Troj mostly uses resembles the Flemish method of layering thin veneers of paint between layers of varnish.

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a child, I was taught to question one-dimensional narratives, which grew from a survival technique to a development technology of the artistic self. The foe I so often portray almost always represents the normalization of one or more dysfunctional discourses, such as the victimization of the female gender, religious dogma and racial inequality.

Like many artists, I discuss personal experiences. At the same time, I strive to escape the self, an urge that partially stems from crossing borders in the last years of the cold war. Living through cultural starvation in my childhood has made me restless and hungry for honest creativity. In that sense, nothing I discuss is strictly personal. Sexual abuse, violence, trauma… I may present an unusual perspective on these topics stemming from the self, but only as an outset. The work needs to keep changing, relive itself, challenge its own conformity.

There is a point in every artist’s career when one is tempted to choose a tested and proven path. I’m constantly trying to resist this temptation by containing the “paths” in series where I can explore a motif or a theme without succumbing to the comforts of one visual style. The artists that I look up to for inspiration have one thing in common – constant renewal.

Traditional elements are very central to my body of work. It’s not so much a need to keep the style ”traditional”, but rather the way I speak. I grew up in a communist country. We sang songs about machines being superior to man and praised modernity while destroying nature and killing creativity and the human spirit with it. At the same time, my summers were spent in the mountains with my grandmother who had hanging gardens, thousand stories and no TV. These two realities are inseparable in my mind.

The painting technique I mostly use resembles the Flemish method of layering thin veneers of paint between layers of varnish. I start with pencils, pastels and varnish. After that I paint a lighter layer with acrylics and finish with a couple of thicker layers using a combination of mediums, often acrylics and oils, but sometimes gold leaf and inks.