Layla Rudneva-Mackay is a New Zealand artist whose practice centres on abstraction as a sustained inquiry into perception, atmosphere, and the poetics of form. Working primarily in painting, and earlier in photography, she explores how colour, surface, and spatial tension shape the embodied experience of looking. Her works often hover between suggestion and abstraction, evoking architectural fragments, still life structures, or interior spaces without fully resolving into representation. Through this restraint, she invites slow, attentive viewing in which meaning emerges gradually through duration and proximity.

Rudneva-Mackay’s paintings are characterised by layered surfaces, nuanced tonal shifts, and carefully calibrated compositions. Colour operates as both structure and sensation—at times muted and meditative, at others luminous and charged—creating psychological depth within seemingly pared-back forms. Her earlier photographic practice sharpened her sensitivity to framing, cropping, and the choreography of visual elements within a picture plane; this awareness continues to inform her painting, particularly in the tension she creates between flatness and depth, surface and illusion.

She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts and has exhibited widely throughout Aotearoa since the late 1990s. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in both public and private galleries, contributing to ongoing conversations around contemporary abstraction in New Zealand.

Rudneva-Mackay’s work is held in significant public collections, including the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki collection (Chartwell Collection), reflecting institutional recognition of her contribution to contemporary art practice. Through a disciplined yet intuitive approach, she continues to develop a body of work that foregrounds nuance, silence, and the subtle architecture of perception.