iva troj
London
A Balkan mountain child and a young arts protege who grew up to become a world
renown contemporary artist with a PhD in art history. Iva Troj grew up in the
outskirts of Bulgaria’s Romani slums in the last decade of communism – a world
full of sexual predators, communist propaganda, censorship and no path to
artistic livelihood other than what she could imagine in her wildest dreams.
Today, she is a Gerety Award winner and 3 times Cannes Lions nominee for her
Halo Masterpiece [biggest ever launch in the Halo franchise’s history, with more
than 20M players, 520M reach], Towry Best of England Award winner, and 2 times
Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year award winner. 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
2021, her epic painting Halo Infinite Masterpiece was exhibited at Saatchi
Gallery and The Louvre. In 2020, her paintings were included in a number of
permanent museum exhibitions in South Asia, among them Haegeumgang Museum
해금강테마박물관 in South Korea. And in Sept 2022, she was invited to exhibit a body of
work at The Louvre in Paris. Troj obtained her first fine arts degree when she
was just 17 years old. After completing two BA degrees and a master’s degree
from the United States and Sweden, she was awarded an art history PhD title. She
is widely known for her fine art pieces which seamlessly merge Renaissance
aesthetics and techniques with postmodern praxis. Her intensely detailed oil
paintings achieve astonishing tricks of light and shade, as practiced by the
great masters. 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.” 22Blocks Agency 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 normalisation of one or more dysfunctional
discourses. 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’s Eastern Europe 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 it” 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. My style and inspiration come from the
techniques of The Old Masters, not just Western but also Eastern European,
Russian in particular. As a child I would often look at art books from the
Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and even Modernism and wonder why the women in them
were so powerless and passive, always laying there nude like they lost the will
to live, combing their hair and undressing, etc. I grew up wishing to become
good at painting so I could change the stories in classical motifs. My technique
resembles the Flemish method of layering thin veneers of paint between layers of
varnish. Beautiful imperfection and constant renewal are themes that flow
throughout my paintings. Awards: 3 x nominee for Cannes Lions Award for Halo
Infinite Masterpiece 2022 Art Excellence Award 2020 해금강테마박물관] Haegeumgang Museum
South Korea. CAF Artist Of The Year 2019 (2d) Contemporary Art Excellence Artist
of The Year 2016 2016 Palm Award Winner 2013 Towry Best of England Award Winner
