Liza Giles: In Flux
Flowers Gallery, London
5 June - 5 July 2025
Elgin, 2025
Acrylic on raw canvas, 130 x 155 cm
© Liza Giles / Courtesy Flowers Gallery
Ledbury, 2025
Acrylic on raw canvas, 150 x 180 cm
© Liza Giles / Courtesy Flowers Gallery
Portand, 2025
Acrylic on raw canvas, 95 x 110 cm
© Liza Giles / Courtesy Flowers Gallery
Flowers Gallery presents In Flux, a solo exhibition of new works by London-based artist Liza Giles. The exhibition title reflects Giles’ process-driven approach, where the act of creation is continuously evolving and in constant transformation. Throughout her practice, Liza Giles explores the tension between fluidity and control, presence and absence, capturing the dynamic, ever-changing nature of her work as it unfolds. This sense of flux permeates each piece, allowing the works to emerge organically, shifting and adapting as they progress.
Known for her large-scale, multi-panel paintings, Liza Giles begins with painted collage maquettes, repositioning elements until a balance emerges. Her method is one of intuitive improvisation, allowing the work to evolve through trial, flux, and chance.
For the first time, Liza Giles introduces six-panel works that are flipped and switched both vertically and horizontally, allowing her to expand the physical and visual complexity of her compositions. As with earlier works, the paintings are built on unprimed canvas, laid flat to maintain control over form and surface. Each piece features a contrast of hard-line edges and painterly raw edges, reflecting a tension between precision and gesture that runs throughout the exhibition.
Liza Giles works with a limited colour palette inspired by the natural landscape, earthy siennas and umbers, grass greens and sky blues, grounded by large areas of her signature ultra-matt black, a pigment that absorbs 99% of light and creates a velvet-like depth. These colours move across the surface with a quiet rhythm, creating a strong sense of push and pull between the positive and negative spaces.
While rooted in the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, with echoes of Franz Kline, and Helen Frankenthaler, Liza Giles’ work is also shaped by her background in printed textiles and her ongoing dialogue with the urban environment. Living and working in London, she draws from the city’s energy, architecture, and moments of visual interruption, shadows, reflections, street markings, and graffiti.
Liza Giles’ process resists overthinking. Each painting evolves through spontaneous reconfiguration and visual experimentation, often refined through photographing different panel combinations around the studio. In a world increasingly governed by distraction and digital saturation, her practice becomes a form of mindfulness, an effort to switch off from modern noise and return to a flow state. For Liza Giles, painting is a way of disconnecting from the algorithmic feedback loops of contemporary life.
Rather than offering fixed meanings, Giles’ paintings invite viewers to connect with their own responses, to feel rather than interpret.
ARTIST LIZA GILES (b. 1971)
“My works are driven by an impetus to ‘switch off’ and re-engage with our instinct. I want my art to speak honestly to its observer in a pure and simple way. My work is essentially about how it makes you feel.” – Liza Giles
British artist Liza Giles’ paintings communicate directly through the use of colour, shape, composition and scale. The abstract, elemental forms found in her large-scale paintings are developed from making smaller collages using found scraps and painted cut-outs. Set across multiple raw canvas panels, Liza Giles intuitively reconfigures the paintings to produce new shapes and unexpected compositions.
Working flat to control the movement of the paint, Giles’ works are characterised by an interplay between expressive feathered marks and formal hard-edge lines. Drawing inspiration from the architectural landscapes of London, where she lives and works, the paintings are imbued with a sense of light and space, as well as the immensity and solidity of the city’s skyline.
Liza Giles graduated with a BA Hons in Printed Textiles from Liverpool John Moores University in 1994. She began working as a textile designer before pursuing an 18-year career as an art director, working on interior photo shoots around the world. Now represented by the gallery, Liza Giles first exhibited at Flowers Gallery in the exhibition Hidden UK, Hidden Ireland, curated by Sean Scully in the summer of 2022.
FLOWERS GALLERY
21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ
