Judy Millar, Outsized Abstractionist, Joins Michael Lett
Millar is among New Zealand's most esteemed contemporary artists, having represented the country twice at the Venice Biennale.
Judy Millar, The Wave Cry, The Wind Cry (2023) (detail). Acrylic oil on canvas. 230 cm x 2550 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland. Photo: Samuel Hartnett.
Auckland gallery Michael Lett announced yesterday that painter and installation artist Judy Millar has joined the gallery's roster.
Millar creates monumental sculpture and two-dimensional works derived from her dramatic, gestural paintings.
She represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, showing her massive vinyl installation Giraffe-Bottle-Gun at the national pavilion. At the 54th Biennale in 2011, she presented a winding, purposefully cumbersome, 20-metre work for the collateral event Personal Structures: Time-Space-Existence.
Millar's process involves painting with decisive, directional in and out brushstrokes, before wiping and scraping from the painted surface. Bold brushstrokes are kept in tension with a backdrop of nebulous hues.
Often, Millar mechanically and digitally reproduces and upscales her paintings in printed enlargements that dwarf the viewer and overwhelm their surroundings.
'An absolutely central interest of mine is how a painting alters its spatial environment', she said in a conversation with Ocula Magazine in 2016.
Less concerned with the wrought expressiveness of action painting, she said 'my work is much more about drawing; it is about looking and seeing, less about "expressing".'
Millar will continue to be represented by Nadine Milne in Arrowtown, Sullivan & Strumpf in Sydney, and Galerie Mark Müller in Zurich.
Her inaugural show with Michael Lett will be held in 2024.—[O]
