Milly James: New Paintings and Louise Blyton: Everydayness

MILLY JAMES: New paintings continues the artist's ongoing investigation into the possibilities and ambiguities of painterly abstraction and its peculiar temporalities.

James’s paintings endeavour to see what is unknown. Through varied gestures the artist renders the point where form becomes image and a finished work reveals the depth of its own process. Auratic in nature, her works are a conduit for intuitive acts and unconscious processes.

Milly James graduated from RMIT University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and completed Honours at Monash University in 2022. New paintings is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following Recent paintings in 2023.

LOUISE BLYTON: Everydayness comprises a suite of constructed, minimal canvases that occupy a liminal zone between traditional painting and sculpture; either designed to hang on a wall or be free standing. Blyton employs precise methods to create lucid, harmonious, and multidimensional artworks that merge colour, texture, and form: building her forms from wood, carefully applying the hand-cut linen so that folds and seams are all but eliminated.

To achieve their highly saturated and meditative surfaces, up to 20 coats of thin acrylic paint are applied to the linen surface. The simplicity of the finished works belies the considerable care, time, and problem solving that goes into their construction, as Blyton transforms raw materials into aesthetic objects capable of projecting meaning into a physical space.

Louise Blyton received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from RMIT University in 1988. She is an alumnus of the Factory 49 Paris Residency, Paris, France, Point B Studio Residency, New York, NY, and Redgate Studio Residency, Beijing, China and has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.