Liliana Pasalic

Adelaide-based artist Liliana Pasalic has a background and formal education in industrial design which organically transmuted into a full-time art practice over the last decade. Her work centres on painting and tapestry while drawing from design recollections, blurring the boundaries between these vaguely intertwined forms. Occupying the realm between abstraction and figuration, she references art history, feminism, identity, the subconscious, human relationships, and iconography infused with her individual outlook as both creator and spectator.

For Pasalic, responding to the work as it evolves is more important than following a fixed, pre-conceived idea from start to finish. Through the combination of unconventional materials, Pasalic continually seeks to redefine the boundaries of painting. The rich, tactile texture of tapestry—woven from Australian wool—invites the viewer to engage in a dynamic, sensorial experience. She employs a lexicon of forms and symbols across a variety of techniques, challenging the operation and apparatus of art-making itself. Here, tapestry is approached as a form of painting, with patches of colour added where needed and two yarn colours mixed to replicate the process in a pointillist fashion. The overlapping layers, often found in traditional painting, create frames within frames, much like a collage.

Pasalic’s work emphasises the interconnectedness of life and all that is—it combines disparate materials, from tapestry and marble to spray paint and mirrors, weaving a story of unity and balance. She translates the abstract into vivid, tangible expressions, offering an acute yet hopeful perspective on the challenges of contemporary human experience.

Over the last two decades, Pasalic has exhibited across solo and group shows globally, including Zagreb, Ljubljana, New York, Bruxelles, Vienna, Jerusalem, Adelaide and Canberra. In 2023, she was a resident in The Mill as well as chosen as a finalist in the National Capital Art Prize.