Holly Coulis’s contemporary explorations of the still life genre have opened up the scope of possibility between abstraction and representation. Her paintings and works on paper skilfully use colour and line to build up objects in layers of paint, pushing flat geometry and perspectival shifts to evoke interwoven compositions that mirror, reflect, and expand space. The artist hints at the fine line between narrative and decoration, offering an interest in still life as an underrated genre - a domestic space in the history of painting and a familiar but disquieting source for contemplation.
The objects in Coulis's paintings and their dimensionality have started to morph in her work over the course of the last few years. She comments, "The work is getting more abstract, which initially wasn't something intentional. When I first started making these still life paintings, I never intended to push them into abstraction, it just slowly started to happen. Now, in the next body of work, I am starting to become most interested in the abstract elements, how the lines intersect and weave and the places that open up for colour. Sometimes I even want to eliminate all recognisable form! I'm not in any rush to do that, but there is part of me that wants to see what would happen if they became completely abstracted.''
View Holly Coulis' artist bio