Judy Miller: Into the belly of the whale

Gallery listing and Media Release

Judy Miller: Into the belly of the whale

28 April – 21 May 2011

bartley + company art, 56A Ghuznee Street, Wellington
www.bartleyandcompanyart.co.nz

Judy Millar’s new exhibition of works on paper at Bartley + Company Art abounds with references to the world despite its seeming abstraction. While painting these works, Millar was reading Herman Melville’s classic American novel Moby Dick and the exhibition can be seen as her tribute to the writer. As Melville immerses readers in the world of whaling and the sea, so too Millar’s richly layered gestural paintings immerse viewers in painting’s possibilities.

I am receiving the sensation of content without the narrative devices that usually deliver it.

Curator Justin Paton said this in conversation with Judy Millar prior to her participation in the 2009 Venice Biennale and the observation seems particularly pertinent to this new body of work. Millar rarely titles her paintings but all the works on paper in this exhibition have titles that reference the novel and Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the great white sperm whale, Moby Dick. They also make explicit the engagement of her painting with the world. Millar’s painting may be perceived as abstract but she has long been interested in the depiction of three-dimensional space. Her distinctive large brush strokes are here overlaid with a complex myriad of fine slashing jagged lines and smaller sweeps of paint that flow and halt and turn in all directions to create richly suggestive forms.

Judy Millar is one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded and internationally successful artists. When she opens a new exhibition at the Venice Biennale (the global art world’s most prestigious event) at the end of next month, she will become the first New Zealand artist to have participated in two successive Venice Biennales. In 2009 she represented New Zealand, along with Frances Upritchard, and she has been invited back this year to participate in a major collateral event. The exhibition Personal Structures, positions Millar in an impressive line up of artists. She will continue her exploration of painting’s relationship to architectural space and is producing a large-scale, three-dimensional work for the exhibition in the Palazzo Bembo on the Grand Canal. Millar is currently in Europe where she is preparing for Venice and another exhibition in Berlin which also opens in June.

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