Lisa Milroy: Here and There

This major solo exhibition brings together a selection of Milroy’s paintings from the past fifteen years, exploring her approaches to still life through making, looking, touch and transformation.

The term ‘still life’ signals the fundamental experience of painting for Milroy, encapsulating her fascination with the relation between stillness and movement, contemplation and action. In the 1980s Milroy’s paintings featured everyday objects depicted against an off-white ground, compositionally arranged in a grid or random scatter and characterised by a quick gestural application of paint. In the 1990s, Milroy shifted from fast painting to a slower, more modulated approach. She began to paint objects within settings, which expanded her understanding of still life to embrace landscape, architecture, portraiture and storytelling. More recently, Milroy’s sense of experimentation has led her to explore painting through installation and performance.