Judy Millar

Gow Langsford is pleased to present Summer Paintings. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings from six painters – Dale Frank, Séraphine Pick, Judy Millar, Ruth Ige, Karl Maughan, and Allen Maddox. The works are eclectic in style, ranging from the Maughan’s meticulously detailed 1997 gardenscape Ashurst through to Millar’s mesmerising Rows for Gertrude Stein, a monochromatic gestural painting from 2002. Each of the paintings demonstrate the skill, flair, and distinctive vision of the artist behind them.

“The works for this exhibition were, for the most part, painted during the year 2020. A period that will be forever bracketed in our hearts and minds as the year of the pandemic. A time when the world went eerily quiet. A time when we were forced to find new relationships with our immediate surroundings.

I spent the year in my isolated home and studio on Auckland’s West Coast. Time slowed. My own focus was on the simplest of things. The movement of clouds. Making fire to stay warm. The light on the water outside my window. Wind and air.

Painting for me is always an attempt to grasp hold of something. As I took the colours of fire, mixed paint to the fluidity of water, produced clouds of coloured spray and attempted to aerate the surface of the canvas into an open space; the solidity of things moved in and out of focus. Forms emerged on the canvas but had a fleeting feeling, as if they were about to dissipate or perhaps hadn’t yet fully formed. Red moved to pink and then back to red. Everything seemed to be in motion. The resulting paintings together form a group where movements continue from one to another, read in this way they become a form of moving landscape. Individually they are snapshots of a particular time and place.”

- Artist Statement, Judy Millar, 2021

This exhibition featuring the work of Alberto Garcia-Alvarez and Judy Millar has been curated by Stephen Bambury. It is exciting to be able to bring the three together in a public dialogue for the first time.

The exhibition will focus on two distinct periods of Garcia-Alvarez’ and Millar’s work. Paintings produced by Garcia-Alvarez during his time in California in the late 1960s have been selected by Bambury to sit alongside paintings painted during the last few years in his Auckland studio. Millar will exhibit work from 1981 when she was a student at Elam together with a number of recent paintings.

Gow Langsford Gallery presents A World Not Of Things, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Judy Millar.

Often working on a large scale, Judy Millar’s latest exhibition Studies in Place provides an intimate viewing of works that are typically unseen outside of her studio; her smaller works on paper. Referenced as ‘studies’, these works showcase Millar’s painterly thought process as she begins to flesh out ideas that may later be conceived on canvas. Unintentionally, these studies become complete works in themselves and have been critical to her practice since 1987, when Millar first moved to the extreme environment that is Auckland’s West Coast.

While working on a group of new paintings during the summer of 2015 Judy Millar had a flashback to a work painted almost 30 years earlier. She was struck by the similarity between a work she had painted in 1987 and her new work both in palette and the overlaid drawn line used to establish depth in the image. Comparison between the works revealed the consistency with which she has worked over the past 30 years. It made evident her determined search to find a way to paint paintings that are both abstract and yet full of imagery.

Five Painters is a cross selection of five contemporary New Zealand artists, each with a distinct approach to painting.

In her exhibition Proof Of Heaven Millar will exhibit a large group of new paintings that she has been working on over the last six months in her Berlin studio. Taking cues from the colours found in post-apocalyptic comics these works glow with an otherworldly light, mysterious and unsettlingly beautiful. Forms appear to emerge and disintegrate in an unstable world of things half-seen and impossible to recognise.

The Wrong Gallery was conceptualized by Maurizio Cattelan, Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni in 2005. It is a 1:6 scale reproduction of New York’s smallest exhibition space of the same name, which they founded together in 2002. Subsequent versions have been shown all over the world including at Tate Modern (2005). Our rendition of The Wrong Gallery will be installed in our Kitchener St Gallery and will, fittingly, be filled with miniature artworks by gallery artists.

Colour – System – Support is a curated group exhibition that brings together four artists who address modernist thought – each pushing and re-figuring painting into new contexts. All of the featured works are painted on the support of metal, as opposed to paper or canvas, which affects the density and weight of colour on their surface. The exhibition is made up of works by two German painters, Gunther Forg and Katharina Grosse and two New Zealanders, Stephen Bambury and Judy Millar, thus adding an international context to the conversation around systems of painting.

Comic Drop an exhibition of new works by gallery artist Judy Millar. Millar is one of New Zealand's most exciting contemporary painters who shares her time between a remote property at Anawhata and inner city Berlin - where her career continues to gain momentum. Comic Drop brings together a series of new works that combine exaggerated enlargements of handmade gestures with vivid colour. In these works Millar continues to takes on the history of expressive painting and turn it inside out.

Recent career highlights include two exhibitions at the Venice Biennale representing New Zealand with her solo exhibition Giraffe-Bottle-Gun 2009; and in Time, Space, Existence a curated exhibition at Pallazo Bembo in 2011. Her work is about to be featured in a large exhibition of star international art in the Czech Republic and an upcoming solo exhibition at IMA Brisbane, Australia.

Driven to Abstraction is a group show of contemporary artists who together represent a diverse range of entry points into abstraction.

Judy Millar’s paintings, based on gesture, lend themselves to elements of both Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. Millar plays on the notion of gesture in abstraction but adds an ironic twist to the discussion by using screen-printing techniques to generate the final image. Like Millar, Simon Ingram’s non-objective canvases signal more contemporary approaches in his innovative use of modern technologies combined with the hand drawn, in his painting practice. The slug-like painted forms in the two Untitled works appear to devour the formal geometric elements of the painting and one senses that with the passing of time these works will return to the pristine plain white surfaces that existed prior to Ingram making his marks.

Max Gimblett’s large diptych Either/Or from 1983 appears at first glance to be a classic piece of American minimalist painting. However the surface of the work is activated by Gimblett’s masterful use of heavy brushwork to create texture. In the centre of each square a rectangle painted in the same colour and manner as the rest of the painting subtly reveals itself to the viewer. Allen Maddox’s ardent and impassioned paintings established him as one for the most noted Abstract Expressionists New Zealand has produced. Colin McCahon’s Jump painting is indicative of the abstracted landscapes for which is well known.

Although not strictly abstract American Isaac Layman’s photographs offer an alternative perspective on everyday subjects, as the context of his subjects is shifted. By shifting scale and limiting colour creates formal abstract compositions. In Blackout Laymen photographs a blind in a window to produce a work that references the American painter Agnes Martin.

Through myriad approaches, media and materials Driven to Abstraction considers the visual language of abstraction.

The Spring Catalogue has become an annual tradition at Gow Langsford Gallery. This year the catalogue exhibition boasts a stellar line up of works. Spring Catalogue 2011 brings together significant works from the local secondary market including paintings by Colin McCahon, Don Binney and Ralph Hotere, works by prominent contemporary international artists including Ai Wei Wei, Damien Hirst; shown alongside works from artists in the gallery stable, including Tony Cragg, Bernar Venet, John Pule, Max Gimblett and Judy Millar.

In a group of works that include directly painted canvasses, combined paintings and digital prints and oversized silk-screened images, Judy Millar’s exhibition Lucifer: Bring the Light! extends central aspects of her painting practice.

In recent years Millar has used mechanically-generated enlargements of handmade gestures and challenged our expectations of expressive gesture and of the efficacy of painting as a means of communication. In these works Millar both distilled and amplified the act of painting. The works distil the essence of the painterly gesture, exaggerating the dramatic intention and collapsing the activity into a singular moment. The initial act of immediacy of the artist in the studio is simultaneously diluted by its translation into digital image, and exaggerated as gestural marks become oversized and threaten engulf the viewer. They present us with a compression of action that packs the same punch and urgency that we find in the advertisements that surround us. There is a clear desire to grant art the same power as all the other images that press upon us daily.

In Lucifer: Bring the Light! this relationship is compounded further as the highly sophisticated printing technologies works have been replaced by low-fi screen-printing methods. If the origins of some of her gestures was perhaps unclear in earlier works in these works their printed nature is overstated. Millar’s shift from digital to manual printing processes have resulted in cruder printed surfaces which reiterate the translation of the artist’s gestural intervention to a printed, more static image. The outcome leaves the viewer confronted by the question of the authenticity of the final result.
Millar takes up violence as a way to compress time and develop a complex pictoriality. She uses it as an energy source rather than it having any moral implications. Like a fight scene in a comic, pictorial complexity is developed then flattened, presenting all the action on one level in a split second. As Robert Leonhard wrote in 2003, “Millar explores a gamut of possibilities: speed, rhythm and incident; compression and expansion; muscularity and dazzle; not to mention representational associations.” These comments apply more than ever to Millar’s latest body of work.

Judy Millar is one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded and internationally recognised artists. Millar, along with Francis Upritchard represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and following the success of her exhibition Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, has been invited to exhibit again at the upcoming Venice Biennale. Millar, approached by Dutch curators Karlyn De Jongh & Sarah Gold will create a new work for the exhibition Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence, a collateral event of the Biennale. The line up of artists is extraordinary and includes revered American minimalist Carl Andre and 'the mother of performance art' Marina Abramovic.

Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence will be on show at prestigious Venetian place Palazzo Bembo, located on the Grand Canal by the Rialto Bridge. Each artist has been nominated a room within the palace and will be creating new works for the show. Millar's work will integrate with the architectural elements of the space and her 3m meter tall canvas will literally fold out the palace window where it will be seen from the Grand Canal.

This is the first time a New Zealander has been invited to exhibit in this context and affirms Millar's international reputation which continues to gain momentum. In the lead up to this exhibition Millar will also be exhibiting new work in The Ring at Rohkunstbau, Berlin. The Ring is based on Wagner's The Ring of Nibelung and is particularly interesting for Millar, as a New Zealand artist because of its shared relationship to The Lord of the Rings.

Developed alongside her work currently on show in the New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale the new work in this exhibition extends Judy Millar’s tireless interrogation of the possibilities...

Judy Millar’s current exhibition Keeping You, You, Keeping me, Me at Lopdell House Gallery gives us a teaser as to what to expect from her new work due to open...