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Title: artist
Country: United Kingdom
City: Brighton

- About -

Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of The Year 2016 and 2013 Towry Best of England Award Winner, Iva Troj seamlessly incorporates her vast experience of traditional painting techniques with postmodern elements to create engaging and stunningly detailed works that challenge the notion of societal conformity. Knowledge of traditional art techniques was first inspired by the necessity to fit within the Cold War aesthetics of social realism. Alongside this, however, lay an acute perception of the reality existent beneath external structures. "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, a 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."