The painter Maria Lalic took part in the exhibition Blue: borrowed and new which inaugurated the New Art Gallery, Walsall in spring 2000. The subject of the show was the use of color in modern and contemporary art. Lalic's three works were from her History Painting series. Working from a Winsor and Newton chart, dividing the invention of different colors into historical periods (from cave painting to the twentieth century), Lalic made monochrome paintings in which all of the colors from each era are painted onto canvas in a succession of glazes, one on top of the other.
Lalic trained at the Central School of Art and Design and the Chelsea School of Art- Her practice developed out of student encounters with the work of American artists, including Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse. She absorbed the Minimalist stricture that the art object should refer only to itself, and also took on board one of the trajectories of avant-garde painting that runs like a thread through the twentieth century, from Matisse's work with color in the 1910s to the development of duochrome and monochrome painting by Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly (Lalic showed in the exhibition Mostly Monochrome at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, in 1996). But Lalic has fused these approaches with their polar opposite, the idea of 'history painting'. Her work can be counted as 'history painting' not because it represents events or allegories figuratively, but because it makes concrete the history of the medium, paint, and of the practice of painting itself.
There is more to Lalic's art than rigorous formality. The paint builds up on her canvases like archaeological strata (we can trace the evolution of each canvas in the drips and dribbles on its sides). The colors have their own emotional and psychological charge, intense and ungovernable, and Lalic describes herself as 'ambushed' by them no matter how objective she tries to be. And although her titles are simply lists of the colors used, they can read like rhythmic incantations. |
