Laidlaw’s multi‐layered image-making process begins with photography. Source material is drawn from his exhaustive recording of his own life, producing thousands of negatives. In recent years, the photographs have focused increasingly on intimate moments between family and close friends, motivated in part by a new appreciation for the banal and a sense of urgency to record otherwise unremarkable moments before they are gone forever. Laidlaw’s use of analogue photography therefore can be understood as a response to the anxiety-induced image production of the digital age, crystallised within the logic of the demand; ‘pics or it didn’t happen’.
The large-format drawings that emerge from this process resemble the kind used throughout the Renaissance period in preparation for a fresco, contemporaneously known as a ‘cartoon’. Throughout the 1500s the ‘cartoon’ drawing was laid on the wall itself and traced or imprinted onto the wet plaster. Laidlaw mimics this process by cutting out the drawing as a single piece and sticking it flat to primed and stretched hessian. This is then sprayed with gouache and acrylic, before the paper stencil is repositioned and sprayed once more – further doubling and undermining the composition.
The result is an assonant visual rhyme, swapping the pop screen prints of Warhol or Rauschenberg for a painstakingly slow process of almost devotional image making.
Laidlaw’s practice grapples with memory, place, and the fragility of representation: the lived experience of a place and the narratives that surround it (including our own Western vantage) are interrogated, often through disruption, layering and visual re‐workings of photography, drawing and paint. He has travelled and worked in contexts of architectural heritage, loss, and intimate domestic life alike.
He lives and works in Berlin.

Education
BA, History of Art, University of Oxford
MA, History of Art, University of Oxford
MA, Fine Art, City & Guilds of London Art School

Exhibitions
2025 | Echoes, group show at A:Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2025 | Playing and Reality, joint show with Dan Rees at VRB Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2025 | Avenir – AW25 Collection, presented at Château Royal, Berlin, Germany
2024 | Kaleidoscop II, group show at Garage OST, Leipzig, Germany
2024 | Three Generations, joint show at La Mairie, Entrecasteaux, France
2024 | The Weeping Tower, group show at The Publisher, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2024 | The Terminal Beach, group show at Efremidis, Berlin, Germany
2024 | Art Busan, art fair presentation with Efremidis at BEXCO, Busan, South Korea
2023 | Define, art fair presentation with Efremidis at Layer 41, Seoul, South Korea
2023 | Artissima, art fair presentation with Efremidis at OVAL Lingotto Fiere, Turin, Italy
2023 | Life Like Looking, joint show with Hayley Tompkins at Efremidis, Seoul, South Korea
2023 | Jackson’s Painting Prize – Shortlist Exhibition, Bankside Gallery, London, UK
2023 | Speculative Properties, group show at Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain Museum, Berlin, Germany
2022 | The Conviction that Art is Necessary, group show at Sewell Centre, Oxford, UK
2022 | Distant Divides, group show at Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany
2021 | Doubles, joint show with Fernando Marques Penteado at June, Berlin, Germany
2021 | From Almora to Amrum, group show at Efremidis, Berlin, Germany

Awards and Shortlists
2023 | Jackson’s Painting Prize – Shortlist, Bankside Gallery, London, UK
2019 | ArtPiq Painting Award – Shortlist, ArtPiq, Düsseldorf, Germany
2018 | Best Site-Specific Installation, The Others Art Fair, Turin, Italy
2016 | Oxford Art Society – Artist of the Year, Oxford, UK
2014 | Sky Landscape Artist of the Year – Shortlist, London, UK