Three paintings from the ‘Colour and Metal’ cycle are permanently installed in the walls of The Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, UK Writing in ‘Untitled’ magazine (in 1993) on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Maria Lalic.. The Opposite Paintings’ at Todd Gallery London the curator and writer Caryn Faure Walker wrote; “The concertedness of these beautiful works is arrived at through rigorous procedure implicit in Lalic’s personal undertaking of the sometimes intense physical labour of construction; this makes them radically different from fabricated objects which repeat reproducibility. There is also a belief in egalitarianism which manifests itself through structure; since the eighties the artist has produced grouped works in which a specific painting within the series is seen as important consequent on the part it plays in the articulation of a conceptual process. It would however be a mistake to see these works as calculatedly dry and without presence. Lalic has spoken of a fascination with the alchemy of materials dating back to her childhood in the North of England. The poles of enquiry which motivate her art include a familiarity with the physics of matter, and particularity of colour: on the other hand, she demands that from this quantification comes what is magical. With her series ‘The Opposite Paintings’ , Lalic has achieved absolute purity. There is considerable pleasure to be experienced sensing the minute changes in the density and scale of colour. That Lalic can achieve this by sacrificing neither sense nor sensibility opens a new territory for painting between the rigorous constraints of conceptualism, the inert reflexivity of concrete objects, and the poetic instrumentalism of found art. That is to say, we are seeing the emergence of a painting in this country which possesses its own significant alchemy -neither American nor European, but equally aware of both”.