Judy Millar (born 1957), who represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2009, has an internationally recognized painting practice. Working from a conceptual painting framework she freely references painting's recent histories, particularly delighting in plundering the expressiveness of gestural painting. Millar takes up known positions only to deconstruct and question their previous meanings.
An increasing dialogue between architecture and painting, between three-dimensional space and the painted surface, question the traditional relationship between the art object and the exhibition space.
A hallmark of Millar's work practice is her process of erasure, wiping or scraping paint off the surface of the work. The resultant image of positive and negative space, of tension and calm, compression and expansion, is an elaboration of the pictorial space.
Judy Millar lives in Berlin and Auckland. Latest exhibitions include A Better Life (Hamish Morrison Galerie), Matte Black (Galerie Mark Mueller, Zürich) Butter for the Fish (Gow Langsford, Auckland), The Secret Life of Paint (Dunedin Public Art Gallery). In 1991 Millar received an Italian Government Scholarship for Postgraduate Study in Turin, Italy. In 1994 she was the Moet and Chandon Fellow in France and in 2002 was awarded the winner of the Wallace Art Awards, New Zealand. Residencies include Goethe Institute, Berlin, Artist in Residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Colin McCahon residency (2006) and ISCP residency New York (2010).
Collections include Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, CAP Art, Dublin. Judy Millar is represented in numerous international private collections.
