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Judy Millar, Untitled, 76 x 55 cm | | |
Spielhaus Morrison Galerie celebrates its 3 year anniversary with a joint exhibition entitled FLAMMPUNKT with New Zealander Judy Millar and Berliner Sophia Schama. The show is part of a gallery exchange with Bartley Nees Gallery, Wellington New Zealand. Juxtaposing powerful painting positions from two women artists, the exhibition explores the borderline between representational and abstract painting.
Judy Millar (born 1957 in Auckland, New Zealand) has developed a painting process which is based on reduction. Creating gestural figures and areas of colour on canvas/aluminium with broad rag-strokes or even using her hands or arms Millar partly breaks them down as she removes the overlying wash of paint. Form is so to speak ‚revealed'. The clue to the appearance of Millar's works lies in this contradictory pictorial process of painting and removing paint.
After an extended residence in Berlin last year works from Judy Millar were to be seen in a group exhibition in Kunstverein Kreis Ludwigsburg. New paintings executed in New Zealand, with which Millar will make her Berlin debut in the Spielhaus Morrison Galerie, mark an exciting development in her work of more pronounced spaciousness and depth. The broad flat brushstrokes themselves become three-dimensional landscapes.
Similarly Sophia Schama's paintings have gone through a further development. The vegetation of her mythical apocalyptical visions of nature have turned into luxuriant grass, which overgrows the canvas in abandoned brushstrokes. As opposed to Judy Millar, Sophia Schama builds the structure of her paintings in a classical manner, layering brushstroke upon brushstroke. Through the use of old, previously painted canvases from earlier periods, areas of colour serve as a foundation, giving a sense of depth beneath the new grass-like structure.
Judy Millar and Sophia Schama show pure painting in their joint exhibition FLAMMPUNKT in the Spielhaus Morrison Galerie. Though their painterly techniques are completely different and come from diametrically opposed sides of the world, a commonality is to be found: the gesture of the artist, the brushstroke of colour itself, becomes the essence of the image.
Judy Millar I Sophia Schama |
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