From June 14th to 29th, you can experience the art exhibition "Imaginary Souls" by Laila Maria Mæland. This is her first solo exhibition, featuring 16 new paintings that have not been shown before.

Laila Maria's paintings focus on creating contact and communication through facial expressions, gazes, colors, feminine beauty, and strength.

She experiments extensively with the tension and balance between the figurative and abstract, light and shadow, hues and complementary colors. Furthermore, she is constantly searching for new techniques and combinations. This results in great variety in her work, and her expression and style are continuously evolving.

Inspiration comes from the human form and movement, colors, textures, flowers, and nature, as well as other artists and illustrators. Most of all, it comes from faces, especially the eyes. Laila describes it this way:

«It feels like painting a soul, a kind of independent existence, which emerges and has a say in the development of the expression and what is to be communicated.»

Her confident lines and brushstrokes reflect countless hours spent drawing and painting what she sees around her and what inspires her, ever since early childhood. Most of it is self-taught, but she has had great help and guidance through her basic education in drawing, form, and color, and further education and background as an illustrator. Her illustration education also opened doors to the sea of possibilities offered by digital tools, where sketches and the composition of her works often originate.

Her paintings are characterized by the illustrator's direct and clear communication. They tell a story, are easy to understand, yet simultaneously possess art's visual beauty and emotional expression.