MARIA LALIC

Maria Lalić (b. South Yorkshire, 1952) is an artist living and working in Bath and Wiltshire, UK.

For Maria Lalić  colour as a specific substance, as material fact and as paint, is central to three extensive bodies of work; colour and time in the 'History Paintings’; colour and material in the ‘Colour and Metal’ paintings; colour and place in the ‘Landscape Paintings’. 

The History Paintings developed around the ‘inventions’ of artists pigment using a readymade structure: an old Winsor & Newton colour chart that categorised colour into six eras from Cave, through Egyptian, Greek, Italian C18th/19th and C20th. The paintings appear monochrome but are in fact polychrome and consist of multi layered glazes of colour, era by era, each listed in the titles. Her notion of ‘History’ in relation to time is threefold – the readymade structure through the Winsor and Newton chart, the desire for pure abstraction of sensation through colour and the ‘Monochrome’ in c20th painting and the concrete, physical process of the making of each painting, evident on the edges of the canvas.

In the Colour and Metal series panels of metal are juxtaposed with monochrome panels painted with artists oil colours derived from the adjacent metal, for example Cremnitz White with lead, Sap Green with copper, Mars Black with iron. In time, the metal panel will change whilst the adjacent painted panel remains unchanged exposing notions of transience and fixity. The facture of these paintings makes specific reference to ‘objectness’ through a relationship with extant work known as Minimalism in the UK and US and Konkret Art in Europe. 

In the Landscape Paintings  Lalić explores the genre in paintings comprised of two horizontally conjoined panels.  In each painting the lower panel is painted in oil paint made from earth she has collected in specific locations and the upper in an eponymously named artists’ oil colour. Together they pay homage to a familiar, extant landscape painting, for example oil paint she made from earth collected in Argenteuil, France, is painted on the lower panel whilst the upper panel is painted with a commercially manufactured artists oil colour ‘French Ochre’. The size of the painting corresponds to Monet’s painting The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil,1872 in the collection of the National Gallery, London. 

Lalić’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in public and private museums and galleries throughout the UK and Europe and in the US and New Zealand; her work is held in numerous public and private collections. Examples include:  Compendium Drawing  in the V&A collection; Colour and Metal works in the Arts Council collection and Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter (a three-part commission); and six History Paintings, part of the Tate Collection, also exhibited in the Start Display, Tate Modern between 2016-2025. Other public collections include those of the Department of Trade and Industry; Deutsche Bank; Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum,Hagen; and the Museum fur Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Painting Prize 1997.

Maria Lalić studied Painting at Central School of Art and Design (BA Hons), Chelsea School of Art (MA) and was Fellow in Painting at Bath Academy of Art 1977-8. She taught at Bath Spa University from 1978 - 2018 and was Professor in Painting from 1998.

EXHIBITION: ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES // July - September 2025

SELECTED WORKS