New Works: Judy Millar

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 inherent in the immediacy of painting as an activity and an act of communication in today’s world.

Millar will present mechanically-generated enlargements of small handmade gestures that threaten to engulf the viewer alongside smaller oil on canvas paintings that present strangely detached images evoking things known but appearing to unravel. In doing so Millar troubles our expectations of the expressive gesture and indeed of painting itself.

Writing on Millar’s Venice exhibition in the recently published “Giraffe-Bottle-Gun”, Jennifer Gross, curator of Yale University Gallery, states “Millar brings the viewer back into the realm of the real, into the place they are standing to reckon with painting in the 21st century.”

In Gross’s words “(Millar) taunts our critical and conceptual faculties by immersing us in the large-scale after effects of her studio practice… Her real activity as a painter has been distilled and translated so that we are forced to contend with our experience of its authenticity…. Millar wants to dissemble the visitor’s safe expectations of painting, and notions of the kind of experience one can have with art. She does not want to be destructive but constructive in this endeavour, she strives to restore her faith and ours.”