Judy Millar
Penelope Judith Millar (born 1957) is a New Zealand artist, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand and Berlin, Germany. Millar received a BFA in 1980 and an MFA from Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts in 1983. As recipient of a Scholarship from the Italian Government in 1990, she spent a year in Turin, Italy, where she studied Italian arts of the 1960s and 1970s. Millar is known for her abstract acrylic and oil paintings. While her works may recall Abstract Expressionist paintings, Millar does not consider her paintings as being 'gestural'. In an interview with Ocula in 2016, she said that, the word that always sets my teeth on edge is ‘gesture.’ Gesture seems like something that comes gushing out from deep inside you. That is not really what I am interested in. My work is much more about drawing; it is about looking and seeing, less about ‘expressing’. I’m using gesture only in the sense that a gesture can communicate something.
Hollow Bones
2017,
Acrylic and oil on canvas
This large-scale work by New Zealand artist Judy Millar, created in 2017, is unsettling despite its abstract pictorial composition. The background surface, which appears gently blurred, deploys refracted, yet strong tones ranging from yellow to reddish, violet to turquoise. The foreground is formed by an amorphous structure that at first conjures up associations with twisted branches, roots or the dried remains of organic material. Abruptly changing direction, the bands of color, with sharply contrasting dark borders and varying widths that evoke echoes of an airbrush experiment gone deliberately awry, seem to float in a kind of psychedelic vacuum. The act of painting, which Millar sees as a constant attempt to turn away from the self, despite her massive, expressive, and singular gesture, is here frozen into a solitary, inanimate universe. Only the meandering object, oscillating like a conundrum between nature and artificial appearance, unmasked by the artist as »Hollow Bones« in the title, hints at traces of former life. But this has long since been extinguished. (Susanne Jäger)
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer