Lisa Dalla Rosa

Taking inspiration from her surroundings' landscapes, Australian painter Lisa Dalla Rosa creates sensuous topographies with a mix of acrylics, inks and other media. Existing outside specific geographic contexts and scales, her compositions evoke microclimates: the two-dimensional spaces call to mind misty dew-soaked hills, meagerly irrigated desert outposts, blistering heat waves and a calming watering hole oasis. Yet Dalla Rosa's paintings aren't exactly landscapes, working on a more abstracted, expressive level. She evokes heat and humidity as much through representation as with the connotations of color and texture.

Manipulating paints and inks, Dalla Rosa's surfaces crackle with fissures that suggest heat and dryness, or seem washed over with the glimmering green and blue veneer of deep, soothing tropical waters. From these geological departure points, she uses the universal lexicon of nature to create moodscapes where brilliant yellow expanses can evoke youthful ambition and deep purple ravines suggest brooding melancholy. Revealing her local landscape to international art audiences, Dalla Rosa mines nature's universal expressiveness that speaks across languages and borders.