Layla Rudneva-Mackay is a New Zealand artist whose practice has a sustained inquiry into perception, atmosphere, and the poetics of life and form. Working primarily in painting, and earlier in sculpture, photography and text 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, landscapes and interior spaces without fully resolving into representation. Through this restraint, she invites slow, attentive viewing in which meaning emerges gradually through duration and proximity.

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. Her works are held in significant public collections across New Zealand and Australia.

Layla is represented by Melanie Roger Gallery