Maria Lalić

Maria Lalić is a British painter born in South Yorkshire in 1952. She studied painting at Central School of Art and Design BAhons) and Chelsea School of Art (MA). She was a Fellow in Painting at Bath Academy of Art 1977-8. From 1978 to 2018 she taught at Bath Academy of Art, now Bath School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University and was Professor of Painting from 1998.

Lalić has exhibited work throughout the UK, and Europe and in the US and New Zealand. In 1997, she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Painting Prize and has work in a number of UK public art collections including Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum and Arts Council England.

History Paintings

She is best known for monochrome paintings named 'History Paintings' (1996-2004). These use the history of certain pigments as a basis for the artworks. In 2000, this series was on display in the exhibition 'Blue: borrowed and new' at the New Art Gallery, Walsall.

"The individual titles of this series of paintings list the separate pigments used to make them. The paint layers can be seen at the edges. The artist says that these edges can be read ''almost like a bar code'', making it possible to ''uncover the history of each painting''. They come from a group of fifty such works, which trace the history of painting by classifying and indexing the development of artist''s pigments, from early cave paintings to the present day. The information is taken from a chart produced by the paint manufacturers Winsor & Newton." Tate website, September 2004