Laila Seidel explores perception, structure, and transformation through the contemporary practice of paper cutting.
For many first-time visitors, New York City is an overwhelming experience. The eye moves constantly between towering architecture, flashing advertisements, crowded sidewalks, traffic, reflections, and an endless stream of visual information. Everything competes for attention at once.
A visit to New York sparked an artistic inquiry that continues to inform Seidel’s work today. Faced with the city’s overwhelming density of visual impressions, she became fascinated not only by its iconic landmarks but by the challenge of perception itself. How do we make sense of such complexity? What remains when visual experience is distilled to its essential structures?
These questions continue to inform Seidel’s contemporary paper-cut practice. Based in the Czech Republic and exhibiting internationally, she works across painting and paper cutting. While her paintings are characterized by vibrant color, expressive energy, and layered surfaces, her paper cuts emerge through an opposite process: subtraction. Instead of adding material, she removes it.
Together, the two bodies of work explore similar questions from different directions. One builds through accumulation; the other through reduction.
Cutting Through the Noise
“Every form is deliberate. Every void is active.”
The statement serves as both a description of Seidel’s artistic process and a key to understanding the work itself. In her paper cuts, absence is never empty. What has been removed becomes as significant as what remains.
While paper cutting has a long history across cultures, Seidel approaches the medium from a distinctly contemporary perspective. Her work is less concerned with representation than with perception.
Photo credits: Photographer Petr Kopal
From Architecture to Abstraction
Architecture plays an important role in Seidel’s paper cuts. Buildings, urban structures, and public spaces provide a framework through which she explores rhythm, balance, and perception.
The New York-inspired works featured in this article emerged from a fascination with the city’s intensity. The sheer volume of visual information creates a constant negotiation between attention and distraction. Rather than attempting to capture every detail, Seidel became interested in what remains when complexity is reduced to its essence.
While architecture and urban environments often provide the starting point, the works are ultimately completed through the viewer’s own associations and experiences.
Several of Seidel’s New York-inspired paper cuts found collectors almost immediately because they evoked memories of the buyers’ own visits to the city. Rather than functioning as straightforward depictions of place, the works create space for personal recollection, allowing viewers to reconnect with moments, emotions, and experiences from their own lives.
This interplay between image and memory is also present in Seidel’s portrait works. Drawing inspiration from portrait photography and the visual language of classic cinema, she creates images that often feel familiar even when viewers cannot immediately identify why. Recognition, memory, and emotional association become active elements of the viewing experience.
Transformation in an Age of Overload
In an era defined by constant stimulation, endless scrolling, and increasing demands on attention, Seidel’s work offers a compelling counterpoint. Rather than adding more information, she explores what becomes visible when distractions are removed.
Working with a scalpel, Seidel removes material one cut at a time. Unlike painting, where layers can be added, adjusted, or concealed, paper offers little opportunity for correction. Once removed, a fragment cannot simply be returned to the composition. Every cut is final. Every decision becomes a visible part of the work.
Art historian Eva Čapková has described Seidel’s work as transforming a historic technique into a vibrant contemporary form of artistic expression. The observation speaks not only to the medium itself but also to the artist’s ability to connect traditional methods with questions that feel increasingly relevant today: How do we navigate complexity? How do we focus our attention? What happens when we intentionally create space?
Another distinctive aspect of Seidel’s paper cuts is their reliance on contrast rather than color. By working primarily in black and white, the compositions remain accessible across different modes of visual perception, including for viewers with color vision deficiencies.
Beyond the Studio
Over the course of her career, Seidel has exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, artist residencies, and art fairs across Europe.
This exploration of transformation will continue through her participation in the Aligned & Integrated Summit 2026, a U.S.-based virtual gathering focused on creativity, personal growth, and transformation.
As part of the summit, Seidel will present a workshop that introduces paper cutting as a mindful creative practice. Beginning with a simple sheet of paper, participants will explore how acts of removal can generate unexpected possibilities. The workshop reflects a principle that lies at the heart of her artistic practice: transformation does not always emerge through addition. Sometimes it begins by letting go.
Looking Ahead
Later this year, Seidel will participate in an artist residency in Japan, where she will develop a new body of work inspired by exploration, observation, and cultural exchange.
While the locations and influences may change, the central questions remain remarkably consistent. What makes an observation truly special? How do we navigate complexity? How do we recognize what really matters?
To learn more about Laila Seidel and her contemporary paper cutting practice, exhibitions, and current projects, visit her official website Laila Seidel. Additional updates can be found on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Information about her upcoming workshop at the Aligned & Integrated Summit 2026.
