Virtual Tour: Judy Millar

A virtual tour of Judy Millar’s Venice Biennale exhibition, Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, in La Maddalena. The historic venue is the only circular church in Venice, designed by Tommaso Temanza and built in 1780.

The generous and unusual physical dimensions of La Maddalena will allow a full play of spatial disruptions, dislocations and inversions.

The exhibition will instigate a lively dispute with the venue in which it intrudes, between the great history of Venetian painting and this contemporary practice. 

More than 70 countries are represented at the 53rd Venice Biennale contemporary art show.  New Zealand is also represented by sculptor Francis Upritchard's work, Save Yourself, at Fondazione Claudio Buziol.

Judy Millar

Working from a conceptual painting framework, Millar freely references painting's recent and not so recent histories. She particularly delights in plundering the expressiveness of gestural painting. Working with processes of erasure, the presence and absence of materials, Millar takes up known positions only to disassemble and shift their previous meanings.

Born in Auckland in 1957, Judy Millar studied at the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating with a BFA in 1980 and an MFA in 1983.

In 1989 Millar returned to the University of Auckland to study the writings of Italian feminist authors. During this time she learnt the Italian language and became more interested in Italian contemporary culture. She gained an Italian Government Scholarship in 1990 and spent a year in Turin researching the work of Italian artists from the 1960s and 1970s. While in Italy she became increasingly convinced that painting could still be a vital part of the contemporary artistic landscape. She returned to her home, Anawhata, on Auckland's west coast at the end of 1990 to develop her now well known painting practice. In 2002 she won the Wallace Art Award.

Since 1998 Judy Millar has lectured in painting at the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts, both in fulltime and part time capacities. The artist is represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich.

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Video supplied by Creative New Zealand, Filmed by BlueBach Productions.