Iva Hladis

Iva Hladis was born in Czechoslovakia in 1965. Her exposure to fine art began early in life, as both her father and mother were fine art painters. At fifteen, she became associated with "Charter 77 ", an underground political group that championed human rights in then Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia. This involvement resulted in her first serious works; a series of dark, emotional paintings of figures over restive backgrounds, paintings which portrayed the hopelessness and frustration of living under a repressive regime. Two principal artistic influences on this budding young talent were Josef Sima and Jan Zrzavy. As with Sima's vaguely identifiable objects and Zrzavy's dark world of the fantastic, her paintings emerged as resolutely in the school of Czech Modernism, her art in its almost violent emotionalism, carrying on the story of loss told in Czech art throughout the twentieth century. In the summer of 1985 Iva escaped Czechoslovakia and made her home in Rome, Italy. A year later she was granted political asylum in the United States. The refugee life of a free, young woman in a strange and exciting new land thus supplanted her previous life of struggle against hardline political repression. Consequently, her painting changed: abstracted figures dominated and an intense symbolism was employed. By 1988 she began working as a painter for Robert Walker. He introduced her to the Los Angeles art scene and helped establish her place within the art community. During the '88-'89 school year, she also worked as an assistant in a drawing class at West Los Angeles College, where she studied at the time. In the fall of 1989, the sudden exhilaration unleashed in Czechoslovakia, by the Velvet Revolution and the end of communist rule, created a reverse effect on her paintings and a return to the old dissident themes she thought were left behind. The reunion with her mother, shortly after, inspired a series of works filled with injustice and despair. It was this body of work that earned Iva a first exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art's (LACMA) rental division. In her more recent paintings, the abstraction has faded and the figures are recognizably human. A new world is revealed in which communication thrives. With freedom comes a new level of introspection, emotion closer to the heart. The work becomes a universal language shared by many. Currently, Iva continues to work and live in Los Angeles.