Peta Minnici (b. 1990, Sydney) is an Australian artist whose paintings investigate how light constructs psychological space. Working primarily in oil, she explores how light, reflection, shadow and spatial relationships shape perception, transforming both architectural interiors and still life arrangements into quiet psychological landscapes.

At the centre of Minnici’s practice is a sustained investigation into perception. Rather than treating light as something that simply illuminates a subject, she approaches it as an active force that continually reshapes the way objects and spaces are experienced. Reflections generate secondary images, shadows extend physical forms into new spaces, and subtle shifts in tone blur the boundaries between presence and absence. Through these relationships, familiar subjects become quietly unstable, encouraging a slower and more attentive way of looking.

Minnici’s interior paintings examine these ideas through architecture. Doorways, corridors, windows and mirrors organise the compositions into interconnected spaces where reflection interrupts and reframes the image. Polished floors and glass surfaces dissolve clear spatial boundaries, allowing interior and exterior, presence and absence, to exist simultaneously. Figures occasionally appear within these environments, not as narrative subjects but as contingent presences that emerge through changing conditions of light and reflection.

Alongside these interiors, Minnici’s still life paintings extend the same investigation through carefully arranged glass vessels, porcelain forms and reflective surfaces. Before painting begins, objects are slowly arranged and rearranged within the studio until the relationships between form, light, shadow and empty space feel resolved. The spaces between the objects become as significant as the objects themselves, creating compositions built through rhythm, balance and visual tension rather than narrative. Reflection and shadow are treated as active participants within each painting. Reflections produce secondary forms that echo the physical objects, while shadows construct a second space that quietly expands beyond the tabletop. Through these shifting relationships, familiar vessels become less fixed and more fluid, inviting viewers to question where material reality ends and perception begins.

Working with a restrained palette of soft greys, muted greens, warm creams and deep charcoals, Minnici creates paintings that reveal themselves gradually through sustained looking. Light moves across glass, porcelain and polished surfaces, continually altering the relationships between forms and activating the surrounding space. Rather than illustrating a fixed story, the paintings invite viewers to experience perception itself as something fluid, continually reconstructed through light.

Minnici has exhibited widely throughout Australia in both solo and group exhibitions, including at Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Brett Whiteley Studio, the National Art School, Kedumba Gallery and Clayton Utz. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the John Olsen Prize for Drawing, the Parkers Fine Art Award for Painting and the Kedumba Drawing Award. She has been a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize (2019, 2021), the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, the Calleen Art Award and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, among others. Residencies include Bundanon Trust and Presbyterian Ladies’ College.

Her work is represented in public and private collections throughout Australia and has been featured in Art Collector magazine, as well as in publications by Amber Creswell Bell (Still Life) and Max Germanos & Judith Pugh (Clayton Utz: The First Five Years).

Minnici holds a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Master of Fine Art in Painting and Drawing from the National Art School, Sydney.