IMAGE: Judy Millar, photo courtesy of the artist. 

As a child, Judy Millar was sure that there must be something hiding behind the image of the world she saw before her eyes – a hidden reality or at least a prop holding up what everyone around her was referring to as ‘the world’. She never found the secret of what lay behind that image, but her childhood dream turned into a preoccupation with turning things inside out in order to see things better. 

In 2009 she represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. Here, she forced shaped and flowing canvases into jarring juxtapositions with Baroque architecture. 

She established a studio in Berlin and began to live between Auckland’s wild West Coast and the deeply historic city of Berlin. 

She built ribbons of painting and suspended them in space and into spaces: A Better Life Berlin in 2010; The Path of Luck, Palazzo Bembo, Italy, in 2011; The Rainbow Loop at MgK in Otterndorf, Germany, in 2012; Be Do Be Do Be Do at the IMA in Brisbane (2013); Space Work 7 at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington (2014) and The Model World, Te Uru Contemporary Gallery (2015). 

Her work for SCAPE 8: New Intimacies in 2015 is her first public sculpture commission.