Lisa Milroy: the colour blue

3 May-31 May 2025

Sky No. 3, 1997, 51 x 39 cm

Overview

Kate MacGarry is delighted to present Lisa Milroy’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Milroy’s appreciation of blue stems from her birthplace and the distinctive coastal landscape of Vancouver where the mountains, sky and ocean embody three registers of the colour - as a solid, liquid and a manifestation of light and space. Ultramarine blue is a key colour in Milroy’s studio practice, the basis of all her greys and shadows, and used in every single painting she has made since the 1980s. The paintings in the exhibition share the colour blue as a unifying feature and were all made in her new studio at Lydd-on-Sea, UK.

Milroy has long been interested in the human relation to objects and, through depicting them, explores questions of representation and the nature of looking at and making paintings. In the 1990s, Milroy’s first landscapes – skies and waterfalls – were a means to explore aspects of time and duration in painting, and how landscape, as well as other pictorial motifs such as architecture, storytelling, city views and portraiture could be considered as still life propositions.

For Milroy, still life has been more of a mindset than a tradition locked solely into the depiction of things. This mindset is defined by the term ‘still life’ itself, which holds within it the duality of contemplation (still) and performance or action (life). The term defines the artist’s own experience and understanding of painting, mirroring her ongoing fascination into the relation between stillness and movement, presence and absence, and the dynamic of making and looking.

Milroy’s new series of sky paintings creates fresh possibilities for her exploration of stillness and movement, and expanding the parameters of still life. Her skyscapes are accompanied by two rather different paintings. One, of shoes, suggests footfall and a tracing and retracing of footsteps; the other, an imaginary object-based scenario, is populated by paintbrushes and different material forms celebrating blue paint.

Lisa Milroy was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1959 and has lived and worked in the UK since 1979. Milroy won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1989 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005. She was Artist Trustee at Tate from 2013 to 2017 and Liaison Trustee to the National Gallery from 2015 to 2017. Milroy is Professor Emerita of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Professor of Painting at the RA Schools. She is founder and Co-director of Hand On Art Workshops, an art educational initiative operating in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya with support from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Recent solo exhibitions include Paper Safari, One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya (2024); Correspondence, Kate MacGarry, London (2023); If the Shoe Fits/Bien dans ses Pompes – Peintures de Lisa Milroy, Frac Occitanie Montpellier, France (2021); Exchange – Paintings by Lisa Milroy, White Conduit Projects, London (2021); taking the side of things, m2 Gallery, London (2021); Ensemble/Together – Paintings by Lisa Milroy, FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, France (2020) and Here & There: Paintings by Lisa Milroy, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London (2018).

Recent group exhibitions include Contemporary Song, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2024-5); Turner’s Sublime Legacy – In Dialogue with Contemporary Artists, touring exhibition at Grimaldi Forum Monaco, France and MAP, Shanghai, China (2024-25); The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK (2024); Forty Years of The Corridor, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik (2023); À toi de faire, ma mignonne, Musée Picasso, Paris, France (2023); Found Cities, Lost Objects, Arts Council Collection touring exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, Royal West of England Gallery, Bristol and Leeds Art Gallery (2022-23); A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022) and Wearing and Staring: YANAGI Miwa and Lisa MILROY, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan (2020).

Artists