Judy Millar
Folding, Unfolding
Judy Millar’s work takes maximal advantage of non-representational painting’s capacity to inhabit and mark out a differential space in which habitual ways of seeing things—for example in terms of oppositions between positive and negative, inside and outside, virtual and real—come undone. Millar in this sense uses painting to show us ways of looking at the world anew. At the same time she interpolates a certain sense of our world, our social and historical present in all its complexity and uncertainty, into what is sometimes mistakenly presumed to be a pure space—the space of abstract painting. In this second sense, her work presents itself as a carefully considered yet very playful re-marking of the grand tradition of pictorial abstraction. In Millar’s case this means taking on issues central to this tradition, such as painterly gesture and expression, ‘action painting’, illusionism, compositional versus ‘all-over’ effects, and the question of painting’s relation to the space where it appears, for example, the regularly overlooked consideration of painting as itself an installational art-form.
We see the logic of reversibility at the most material and procedural level of Millar’s work—in the play or flow that goes on between the removal of paint and its application, or between the ‘before’ of one gesture and the ‘after’ of another. We also see it in her complex engagement with the history of painting—particularly parts of it that we are too often told we have gone ‘beyond’—in what is simultaneously a re-activation and an inflection, a transformation, of this history.
Morgan Thomas
This is an edited excerpt from: Morgan Thomas, Folding, Unfolding: Judy Millar’s 'Something Nothing', Christchurch: 64zero3 Gallery, 2006. Reproduced with kind permission of Morgan Thomas and 64zero3 Gallery, Christchurch.
Judy Millar artist bio:
Born 1957 in Auckland, New Zealand
Currently lives between Auckland, New Zealand and Berlin, Germany
Master of Fine Arts, Auckland University
Selected solo exhibitions include: 'I is She as You to Me', Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin (2003); 'I Will, Should, Can, Must, May, Would Like to Express', Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland (2005); 'Her Eyes Are Hell', Mark Mueller Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland, (2005). Selected group exhibitions include: 'IS/NZ', Kunstverein Kreis Ludwigsburg, Germany (2004); 'Fragmente dea Paradieses', Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland (2003).
Image credits:
Installation view of 'Telecom Prospect 2007' featuring:
Judy Millar
Untitled 2005
acrylic and oil on canvas
Courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
Untitled 2006
acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of the artist
Installation view of 'Telecom Prospect 2007' featuring:
Untitled 2006
acrylic and oil on canvas
Courtesy of 64zero3 Gallery, Christchurch