Rock Drop

Working from a conceptual painting framework, Judy Millar freely references painting's recent histories, particularly delighting in plundering the expressiveness of gestural painting. More recently she has embarked upon a push-pull interplay between architecture and painting, between three-dimensional space and the painted surface, and between the painted and photographic image as she questions assumed relationships between the art object and the exhibition space. She activates paint with great energy; wiping, erasing and scraping to cast images of tension and calm, compression and expansion, to form an elaboration of the picture plane that visually articulates micro and macro worlds.

In this commissioned work Millar asked herself, ‘How much energy can a work pump into this space?’. Her intention was to create a work that challenged the dominating and unusual liminal space between the new and old buildings. The work establishes a tension in the space by touching the classical wall of the original gallery with its ‘blind’ windows, as well as being suspended from the lofty ceiling yet being connected to the stone floor to create a work in two pieces that twists within and inhabits the space to create a dynamism and power that will arrest and hold audiences’ attention.

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