JUDY MILLAR

Early Life and Career

Born in 1957 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Millar studied at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, completing a BFA in 1980 and an MFA in 1983. Immersed in debates about the viability of painting in the late 20th century, she began to explore how gestural abstraction might be rethought through scale, process, and context rather than abandoned. Her early exhibitions in Aotearoa’s galleries and project spaces established a commitment to the physical act of painting, even as she questioned the mythology of the heroic brushstroke.

Since the mid-2000s, Millar has divided her time between a remote coastal studio near Auckland and an inner-city base in Berlin, a split that has shaped both the material and conceptual reach of her work. A decisive moment in this period was her residency at McCahon House in 2007–08: Millar has described it as “a complete turning point”, recalling the experience of living alongside Colin McCahon‘s former home and archive as one that compelled her to “wise up, get serious” at exactly the right moment in her life and practice. The residency offered concentrated time, space, and proximity to McCahon’s legacy, helping consolidate her ambition at a moment just before her representation of New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale brought her work to much broader international attention.

Works and Methods

Millar’s practice is often described as being “about painting”, her process “painting backwards”. She is known for a process that begins with gestural marks, but often also involves photography, digital manipulation, enlargement, and re-inscription onto canvas, vinyl, or other substrates through processes such including printing, erasure, wiping, scraping, and overpainting. This highly mediated approach undermines the idea of the spontaneous gesture, presenting instead images in which gesture is both performed and mechanically repeated, at once intimate and monumental. Her paintings typically unfold across large formats, where swooping, ribbon-like forms tangle and collide in saturated colour, generating a sense of the bodies movement that seems to exceed the physical boundaries of the work.

Alongside canvas-based works, Millar has developed immersive installations in which printed and painted surfaces curve, fold, and loop through space, effectively turning painting into architectural props. At the 2009 Venice Biennale she presented environments that wrapped digitally enlarged gestures around cylindrical and wall-based structures, so that viewers walked inside the expanded space of the painting rather than simply facing it. Subsequent exhibitions have continued this spatial exploration, using freestanding painted forms and digitally produced surfaces to create a “four-dimensional” experience in which colour and mark appear to twist through time as well as space.

Millar’s palette often shifts between acidic, synthetic hues and more earth-bound tones, reinforcing a central tension in her practice between the organic and the artificial. She engages the canvas on the floor with her whole body, scraping, pushing, and erasing paint in a process that is improvisational yet carefully constructed. Scale is integral: works oscillate between intimate, hand-sized gestures and their monumental enlargements, creating a disorienting play of proximity and distance.

Exhibitions, Collections and Recognition

Over more than three decades, Millar has exhibited widely in Aotearoa and internationally, with solo shows at institutions including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, City Gallery Wellington, Te Uru, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, and numerous European and Australasian galleries. Recent solo exhibitions include Cry Sea, Cry Sky at Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington (2024), Questions I Have Asked Myself at Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich (2022), Action Movie at City Gallery Wellington (2021), The Future and the Past Perfect at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2019), My Body Pressed at Te Uru (2019), and Rock Drop at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2017). She represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participated in a major collateral exhibition at the 2011 Biennale, affirming her international profile.

In 2026, Millar presents a solo institutional-scale show at Wellington’s Robert Heald Gallery, a solo presentation at Aotearoa Art Fair with Lett Thomas, and a two-person project with Kate Newby, these exhibitions extend her ongoing exploration of gesture, space, and viewer experience into new bodies of work.

Millar’s work is held in significant public and private collections in New Zealand and abroad, and she has continued her relationship with McCahon House as an advocate and trustee, underscoring the residency’s lasting importance.

Judy Millar FAQs

Ocula | 2026