LISA MILROY

The exhibition explores how painted depictions of objects can spark associations, leading the viewer to poetically-charged connections and memories. For Milroy, this looping interplay between the painted materiality of an object and its associations embodies a tension that can be expressed through duality: ‘knowing / not knowing’, ‘having / lacking or losing’, ‘presence / absence’ - key critical perspectives that have come to define her practice. Milroy’s early works featured groups of everyday objects depicted against an off-white background. Subsequently her imagery expanded to include objects within settings as well as landscape, architecture, people, pattern and textiles. As her approaches to still life have diversified, so has her manner of painting, evident in a range of innovative styles and syntaxes.

There is a playful underlying theme in the exhibition that refers to the game of ‘rock paper scissors’. By association ‘rock’ becomes pigment, ‘paper’ suggests canvas and ‘scissors’ the paintbrush, the impact of one on another igniting imaginative and material transformation, generating correspondence between things and evoking the actions of cutting, folding and placing.

’...Lisa Milroy’s focus has not deviated from the ordinary things that surround her, the recognisable forms from a shared cultural field. Her object paintings of the last forty years can be said to epitomise a contemporary possibility for the historic genre of Still Life.’

Ann Gallagher, excerpt from Correspondence exhibition text, May 2023

Lisa Milroy was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1959 and lives and works in London. Milroy won the John Moores Painting Prize 1989 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include If the Shoe Fits/Bien dans ses pompes, FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, France (2021); Exchange – Paintings by Lisa Milroy, White Conduit Projects, London (2021); Taking the Side of Things, m2 Gallery, London (2020-21); Same and Different – Paintings by Lisa Milroy, One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya (2021); Wearing and Staring: YANAGI Miwa and Lisa MILROY, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan (2020); Ensemble/Together – Paintings by Lisa Milroy, FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, France (2020); Here & There – Paintings by Lisa Milroy, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London (2018).

Selected recent group exhibitions include 40 Years of The Corridor, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik (2023); Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City, an Arts Council Collection touring exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, Royal West of England Gallery, Bristol (2022-23); A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Milroy was Artist Trustee at Tate from 2013 to 2017 and Liaison Trustee to the National Gallery from 2015 to 2017. She has taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL since 2009. Milroy’s work is held in public collections, including Tate, London; FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, France; Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany and Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan.