Liliana Pasalic’s 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 to explore female identity, the subconscious and human relationships through symbols infused with her individual outlook as both creator and spectator.

For Pasalic, responding to her 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.

Still Life With Gropius And Australian Gin is part of a body of work that challenges the contemporary art landscape through still life, abstraction, and collage. The use of sequins highlight the tension between conventional and unconventional art-making practices, while the depiction of still life objects provides a modern perspective on traditional subject matter. Sequins are utilised due to their ‘light-soaking’ and ‘light-reflecting’ qualities in which they become dynamic before the viewer. As our perspective shifts, the work changes to reflect different parts of its environment.