Iva Troj

Personal History

Troj grew up in Europe’s oldest city, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, during the last decade of communism. The communist regime was all about elite talent, whether it was athletes or artists. Marked early on as an arts protégé,Troj was accepted into a Florentine-style art academy when she was 13. She was given a team with the goal of driving her to perfection. They were very tough on her. For one class she was tasked with creating hyper-realistic drawings. The teacher would walk around with a roller and hit them if their lines weren’t within a millimeter of where they were supposed to be.

Troj had a fine arts degree by the time she was 17. At age 19 she was recruited to study art in the U.S. She was a single mom at the time and decided to study printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts. There she was revered for being able to do things nobody else could. However, Troj felt the perfectionism that had been driven into her stifled her growth, believing that she couldn’t improvise or be spontaneous while painting. She felt frozen.

After finishing her studies, she moved to Sweden and studied further but as a single mom, she ended up taking corporate jobs to make ends meet. Then, in the early 2010s Troj found her way back into the studio. By this time, she was ready to have some fun with her art and felt free to break out of the artistic constraints of her past. This is the work that has gone on to be coveted by collectors worldwide.

In 2023, she became Dr. Iva Troj, getting a PhD based on her thesis on artistic failure, a subject most colleges and universities didn’t want to touch, so she funded the supervision of it herself.

Influences and Process

Having a very lively imagination, when she was little Troj envisioned that Caravaggio was an ancestor of hers. Even though his artistic life was over 400 years ago, Troj felt he was a kindred spirit and felt connected to him. He’s someone she has admired her whole life. He also played a proponent role in her thesis on artistic failure, since he was considered a failure in his time and his work was only recognized many years later.

She also has recently been fascinated with William-Adolphe Bouguereau because she has been working toward the same kind of softness that he has in his paintings. She has actually taken some of his motifs as the basis for some of her art. She doesn’t copy them; she is inspired by them.

Part of why Troj takes classic motifs and transforms them into contemporary stories is to keep the composition of a painting and subtly change the content so someone might think it’s the same painting until they really start to look at it and discover that nothing is exactly the same.

“I did a Star Wars-inspired kind of Ophelia painting where I changed everything but the composition,” said Troj. “People were like ‘oh, that’s Ophelia, by what’s-his-name’ but everything else was different. I play off these things because it introduces the familiarity and legitimacy of the story and then you realize it’s actually not the same story. There’s a magic moment happening when you do. I’ve had people who collect my art contact me years later and say they look at it every day and always see something new.”

Troj employs a personal adaptation of the Flemish method, which is a transparent oil layering technique that builds the narrative depth. The process begins with a mind collage of some kind or another. It could be a pencil sketch, an idea from wandering around museums, a narrative she wants to pursue or some reference photos. Then she does a very detailed sketch that is cut up and moved around until she feels it’s in the right direction.

This is followed by a “dead layer” which is part of the Flemish method, which is a very monochromatic under painting. After that she starts building layers of color. For instance, if it’s a portrait, she starts with a layer of blue because we have blue veins under the skin and that gives the later layers of skin tones a more realistic feel. Finally, there’s the last layer (or sometimes two layers) where she adds all the details. When that is done, she puts a glaze on it, which is her own special mixture.

Accomplishments

• Over 18 solo shows, including at major institutions like the Saatchi Gallery and the Louvre
• Over 30 group exhibitions, including showings at Outre Gallery, the Louvre, Dynamite Gallery, Modern Eden Gallery and Shibuya Art Expo.
• Gerety Award winner
• Three times Cannes Lions nominee for her Halo Masterpiece, which was part of the biggest launches in the Halo franchise history
• Towry Best of England Award winner
• 2 times Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year award winner
• Part of permanent museum exhibitions throughout South Asia, including the Haegeumgang Museum in South Korea
• Featured in over 50 magazines
• Published her book, “Hello Troj. You Can Leave Now”