In 1971 an exhibition of 10 Big Paintings opened at the Auckland Art Gallery. All the exhibited artists were men. 50 years later Millar has painted the eleventh work for that exhibition.

The work was painted during the last months of 2019 as Millar felt urgency in the air and rolled out the largest canvas she could across her studio floor and got to work.

The situation of our current times as Covid-19 creates havoc and heartache across the planet is beyond anything she could have imagined.

http://www.roberthealdgallery.com, Wellington, New Zealand. Opening 12 March 2020

“Untitled, 2005, is both an extraordinary painting in its own right and a key pivotal work in Millar’s œuvre. Alternatively celestial or oceanic, it marks a critical juncture in her practice coincident with the consolidation of her on-going commitment to presence in both Aotearoa New Zealand and Germany and Europe. While pronounced now, this wasn’t necessarily quite so marked when it was first shown in an expansive and experimental exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery “I will, can, must, may, would like to express”from September to November that year. It was the most difficult painting in the exhibition, a building site painting or work in construction as Millar described it in an accompanying exhibition brochure. Certainly unruly, anarchic, even within an exhibition that challenged assumptions as to what painting might entail, it escalated the core motivations of her practice at that time. In an exhibition filled with actual and potential jumping off points, this painting was the most extreme, the most risk-taking and, in a very precise sense given it is such an important concern for the artist, in retrospect it seems to have been the most present.”

P. Shand 2019

Frozen Gesture

Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland

18th May  – 18th August 2019

In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein created his famous brushstrokes and in so doing transformed the subjective gesture of heroic Modernism into a trivial comic drawing, transposed into the large format of a museum.

Konrad Bitterli, Lynn Kost, and Andrea Lutz curate the extensive Frozen Gesture exhibition – a sheer range of gestures in contemporary painting, presented by Kunst Museum Winterthur. The exhibition brings together important individual pieces by outstanding protagonists of Abstract Art, such as Gerhard Richter and David Reed, with extensive work groups of contemporary artists such as Franz Ackermann, Pia Fries  and Judy Millar – to create a fascinating display of works of exceptional painterly quality and inconceivable sensory appeal.

The spontaneous movement of the brush on canvas mutated into a quote, the emotional exploration of depth morphed into a Pop surface in signal colors. The purported immediacy of the expressive painterly act thus became an ironic reflection on the medium of painting using the means of mass culture.

This distanced and self-reflective approach had defined contemporary painting since the end of Modernism. It highlighted the fundamental elements of the image, such as the appearance of the colors and the pigment, the color fields and their limits, and not least the application of paint in the form of a gesture.

This gesture had long since abandoned directly expressing existence in favor of any number of different discursive strategies and painterly approaches. To this day, artists underscore the problematic nature of the impact of the application of color and are forever reinterpreting it – from the gesture as a semiotic abbreviation for painting through to its diverse transformations in images.

Curators: Konrad Bitterli, Lynn Kost, and Andrea Lutz

Source.

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Galerie Mark Mueller  presents the group exhibition Single, but happy.  Zurich, 8th June – 20th July 2019

A World Not of Things

Solo exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand.

17th April – 11 May 2019

Judy Millar, March 2019

I was sitting down to write up notes about this exhibition on March 15^th when headlines wrote themselves across my screen. A man and a gun had vented rage and hate against fellow New Zealanders in their time of prayer.

Times like this make you question a life in art, a life that is in itself a kind of devotion. It can seem to lack the necessary force to counter-strike. It can seem too invisible as an influence on everyday life.

The seeming inadequacies of art became even starker when I began to view this desperate act of violence as part of a broader picture appearing around the world. We have long lived in a world that has assumed white superiority but it is fast ramping up, in so many parts of the world, into an outright declaration of supremacy.

We are living in a time where democracy itself seems challenged if not directly threatened.  We have reached a point where we make enemies of those who hold different political perspectives than our own.  We live in a time where we ‘unfriend’ those who challenge or criticise us.  Where we object to listening to opinions we don’t already fully agree with and where we respond with outrage to views that clash with our own. All of these attitudes and behaviours run counter to the core democratic principle of respect for differing opinions.

I have always believed that involvement in art is primarily about absorbing different points of view. Being open to art is about gaining the flexibility to look at things from all sides and in doing so to nourish our empathic humanity. But on March 15^th I once again had to ask – is this enough?

I still don’t have an answer to that question but while thinking deeply on this over the ensuing days I stumbled on this quote from Simone Weill. In her Notebooks she writes that we are helped by meditating on “absurdities which project light”.

For now this definition seems a suitable definition for art, and one that can give me some hope as to art’s ongoing importance. At the very least I will take it as a definition of my own project.

I have worked hard to light these canvasses from the inside out. I have sought to combine the paradoxes of coloured earth and a suggestion of the immaterial. I have desired a feeling of space and surface coexisting. I have tried to evoke dusk – the time of day that is neither day nor night but is both at the same time. I have wanted to suggest a multitude of things and nothing at all.

I know this is not enough, but for the interim it is what I can offer. I hope that it will encourage contrasting viewpoints. In doing so it might enable the widening of our individual perspectives.

“The gestural and abstracted surfaces of Judy Millar’s art are both intensely physical and highly mediated structures, reflecting the paradox we face of inhabiting both corporeal and cognitive realms.

Millar, a distinguished and internationally acclaimed artist, employs the processes of erasure – wiping and scraping paint off the surface of the work – to create visceral canvasses that invoke a sense of the body.” 

art_messenger 2019

Without the shock and awe of leviathan size these works must be on point. And they are.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/@living-room/2018/08/24/207068/never-neutral-abstraction-in-auckland

The Waves

A group exhibition lapping at the shores of heteronormative sanctity, curated by Kate Britton

Sullivan+Strumpf,  Sydney

18th August 2018 – 15th September 2018

The Waves borrows its title from Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, in which many voices unite in a single narrative. This exhibition likewise unites many voices to tell a single yet multivalent story. This story is about what happens in a white cube occupied by women and non-binary voices, and why we should be listening.

The Waves brings a diverse group of artists into a conversation about feminism, bodies, access to and occupation of space, collective action and gestures of intersectionality. In making their work, each of these artists chip away at the walls and barriers that are thrown up by patriarchal systems, biological determinism, trans-exclusionary feminism, colonialism – the list goes on.

The feminist project has been characterised by waves, a lapping at the shores of heteronormative sanctity. The works presented from these artists engage with different aspects of this project: political, social and labour-based action; reclamation and celebration of diverse bodies and identities; intersectionality; and an emergent collective anger – #metoo.

In bringing together work from Sullivan+Strumpf artists with invited artists, The Waves establishes new lines of sight between the work of diverse women and non-binary people.

Karen Black
Ohni Blu
Polly Borland
Barbara Cleveland
Christine Dean
Joanna Lamb
Lindy Lee
eX de Medici
Sanné Mestrom
Judy Millar
Dawn Ng
Thea Perkins
Katy B. Plummer
Justine Youssef & Leila El Rayes
Hiromi Tango
Angela Tiatia
Jemima Wyman