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renting pictorial conventions of gesture, composition
or surface. The impact of the work remains
extraordinary and compelling, disorienting and
forcibly challenging any presupposed, comfortable
or anticipated means of engagement—a defiant
painting.^5
More recent paintings from 2017 and 2018 dial
that condition back a little, though with no loss of
exhilaration. The compositional complexity is less
raw but a similar sense of acute and active searching
remains. It primarily results from the interrelation
of complex, twisting compositional forms escalated
by her use of diverse paints and painting effects.
Their energy is vortex-like, as if a palpable and
sudden shift in barometric pressure consolidates and
concentrates how one experiences the paintings. It is
also due to a shift in palette; hues move to a range of
seemingly mutable tones like intensities immediately
ahead of dusk. Significant, too, are the subtle, almost
imperceptible shifts in size of the canvases where
differences of 50 mm. in width confirm the precision
by which Millar negotiates the relationship of painting
as verb to painting as noun and back again.
That negotiation is a persistent feature of her
practice that, perhaps, is most emphatically presented
in painting where she uses screenprinting to enlarge
and to replicate gesture. Raft (Gold) and Split Ferryman
(green/red), both from 2012, are included in the
exhibition. The to and fro between an ‘originating’
gesture and its ‘replication’ is something Millar
utilises as part of her consideration of painting’s
operation.^6 If some canvases, even large ones such as
Untitled from 2005, challenge but ultimately reinscribe
bodily limitation, her use of reprographic technology
proves an arena for gesture on an entirely new scale—
akin to the difference between oil sketches and their
fresco cycles.^7
Millar doubles back on this approach at St Gallen
with a suite of six huge shaped paintings made
for the exhibition and installed as if dropped into
the Kunstmuseum’s Skylight Hall by a curious,
playful giant. These, each between 5 and 8 metres
in length/height, recall the shapes and palette
of Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, her New Zealand Pavilion
Venice Biennale exhibition of 2009. Unlike the
installation in La Maddalena, however, these are
manually sketched versions of the prior reprographic
paintings.^ The resulting hand-painted copies are
both discombobulating and affirming. Each titled
It to Them, to Us to I, they insisted on a different
feeling again of engagement with her practice at
St Gallen, notably the simultaneous intimacy and
wonderment of the physical marks and their folding
of methodological sequencing and thereby time, space
and scale—small sketch to enormous screenprint to
gargantuan sketch. The Swiftian sensation was present
remarkably in this by turn upending, fascinating and
joyous room, turning its audience to new arrivals in
Brobdingnag or miniaturised and walking through
Millar’s own maquette for the installation.^8
In addition to the paintings Wäspe included ten
masking-tape works undertaken in 1981 and from
1995–98. He drew attention to the acts of placement
and removal evident in the works, giving renewed
focus to the subtractive procedure involved in
their realisation, including the light tears of paper
as the tape is drawn away from the support. I first
encountered these works almost 20 years ago^9 (just
prior to the phase of Millar’s practice concentrated
on at St Gallen) and it was thrilling to return to them.
Humbling too because in my past enthusiasm I had
not taken in or not really appreciated their acuity,
finesse and challenge. Like the reprographics, they
unpick assumptions of order and finish—here the