One-Two

With a palette made up of unexpected combinations of colour, Millar regularly plays with the tension between background and foreground. Often using black mark-making over washes of colour mixed directly on the surface of the canvas. Directional strokes move in and out of nebulous clouds, blocks and intensities of hue. Painting is at the service of gestures which in turn build space within the scope of the canvas. Through gesture alone her painterly world grows, extends and occupies built environments, often at an architectural scale. Millar challenges her paintings to

exceed human proportions, often dwarfing those who encounter them and acting as a reminder that human concepts of beauty, the world and spirit surpass the individual.

Millar painted One-Two, 2024 at a cinematic scale in her studio on the West Coast of Auckland which inhabits the same view westwards across the Tasman Sea that stimulated Colin McCahon’s Necessary Protection series, foremost to connect with the environment. Simply titled after the first two natural numbers, Millar refers to the hovering of two dynamics in painting – foreground/background, colour/non-colour, the world of the earth/the world of the painting. In this magnificent three-panel work we see Millar at her dynamic best wrestling with the age-old question of how to capture and hold the attention of a moving audience in front of a still art form.

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