Tristian Koenig is delighted to announce the opening of Cosmic Cuttings, a solo exhibition of paintings by emerging artist Laura Skerlj. The exhibition presents a selection of small works that reconfigure the formal vocabulary of Skerlj's practice across a variety of painting materials and supports.

Laura Skerlj's paintings, despite their synthetic and sanguine palette, are rooted firmly in the traditions of landscape painting, which includes the modernist extrapolation of this formal language into abstract and purely pictorial ‘space’. Using scenic vistas, crystalline structures and cave-like apertures as a basis, Skerlj has previously painted in a direction that has affirmed the more 'figurative’ aspects of this genealogy of abstraction.

Cosmic Cuttings represents a significant departure from this trajectory, shifting toward a plasticity that is ‘spatial’, but ultimately not referential, to illusionistic volume within the picture plane. Skerlj achieves this through cannibalising previously unresolved works and collaging these elements on to new paintings, creating obvious interstitial layering. The use of collage as a deliberate strategy-- both literally and as an approach to painting in general-- subverts the authority of Renaissance perspective in a gamble that ultimately pays off for the artist. While the works are modest in scale and propositional in nature, the paintings in Cosmic Cuttings impart a sense of excitement and experimentation, indicative of a painter continually moving forward.