Judy Millar: A Better Life

1 May – 5 June 2010 at Hamish Morrison Galerie, Heidestrasse 46-52, Berlin 10557
Exhibition Opening: Friday, 30 April 2010, 6pm

Hamish Morrison Galerie is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Judy Millar. The exhibition, entitled A Better Life, is Millar’s first solo show in Berlin since her major installation in La Maddalena at the 2009 Venice Biennale

“Reality, then, as in concepts such as ‘landscape’ or ‘space’, is not something external or ‘given’ for our apprehension, rather it is constituted, or ‘formed’ through our participation with things: material objects, images, values, cultural codes, places, cognitive schemata, events and maps.”- James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention

For Millar’s intervention in La Maddalena, giant canvases covered in the artist’s blown-up gestures folded and unfolded through the space, revealing the church to viewers like a piece of living cinema. Now, for this exhibition, she takes on a white cube gallery: a completely different space  from a Baroque church, but one just as loaded with painterly history, and just as transformed by her bold installation.
Millar’s installation, then, is not just an object that we are asked to quietly inspect. Demanding, playful, and sometimes outright confrontational, it pushes and pulls us towards new experiential discoveries. In doing so, it holds the promise of a better life; an optimism about our experience of the world around us, and the vital, human role that art plays within it.

Judy Millar lives and works in Berlin and Auckland. She is currently completing a three-month residency at the ISCP programme in New York. She represented New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale.