From 5:30 am to 7:30 am brings together drawings by Iva Gueorguieva from different periods of her practice, with a focus on a series made during the early morning hours in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025. Moving between abstraction and figuration, the drawings explore the unpredictable nature of mark-making, the freedom of gesture and the shifting boundaries between dream and reality.

From 5:30 am to 7:30 am brings together drawings by Iva Gueorguieva from different periods of her practice, spanning 1998–2006 and 2018 to the present. At its centre is a series made during the early morning hours at her home in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025. While her family sleeps and the first light enters the garden, the world gradually comes into focus. For Gueorguieva, these hours hold a particular quality: dream and reality have yet to fully separate, and the eye remains sensitive to what might otherwise go unnoticed.

For Gueorguieva, drawing is a physical act whose outcome cannot be determined in advance. Lines are repeated, interrupted or redirected; stains, gestures and unexpected marks take the work in unforeseen directions. She compares drawing to walking or dancing, describing it as a way of entering a state of freedom and concentration. The aim is not necessarily to make an image, but to remain open to what emerges through the act itself.

Across the drawings, human and animal figures appear, mutate and hover between recognition and abstraction. Some are comic or absurd; others carry a sharper, sometimes political charge. Humour, distortion and caricature are central to Gueorguieva’s approach. She describes drawing as agile and impolite: a form of expression that can resist convention, evade fixed meanings and respond directly to the world.

At Bradwolff & Partners, the sheer number of drawings allows individual works to be seen in relation to one another. Gestures and forms recur, but never quite in the same way. A mark that seems incidental in one drawing may take on a different resonance beside another; a figure briefly recognised may reappear elsewhere in altered form. The exhibition unfolds through these echoes and differences, inviting viewers to make their own connections rather than follow a single narrative. The drawings become less a collection of finished images than a record of an ongoing encounter between the body, the imagination and the world.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a book of drawings and poems by Iva Gueorguieva will be published by Bradwolff Editions, the publishing imprint of Bradwolff & Partners. The artist describes her drawings as full of chatter, while the poems are distinguished by their quietness. Rather than explaining the drawings, the poems stand alongside them, opening up a different, more enigmatic dimension of her practice.Iva Gueorguieva (1974, Sofia, Bulgaria) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Her work explores the relationship between painting, drawing, collage and installation, with forms that continually shift and transform. She has exhibited at institutions including the Benton Museum of Art, UTA Artist Space and LACMA. Her work is held in the collections of MOCA Los Angeles and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She has received, among other awards, a Howard Foundation Grant and a Pollock-Krasner Grant. In 2026, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Parallel exhibition: Iva Gueorguieva, Imprints, Movement Exposed Gallery, Utrecht, 8 November 2026.