Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present Floating World: The Light the Bird Sees, Andrew Millner’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will open on February 24th and will run through April 6th, 2024. The public is invited to attend an opening reception and artist talk on Saturday, February 24th.

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Millner’s work investigates the relationship between art and nature, the natural and the man-made. Based in St. Louis, MO, the artist has executed different bodies of works over his decades-long career. He began using traditional pigmented materials on canvas to convey the complexity of lines and contours seen in organic forms, such as flowers, leaves, or trees.

As his graphic explorations developed, Millner began to ponder: how to depict an entire tree through representation. How can one draw all its components and convey all the individual parts simultaneously on a single picture plane? He found the use of traditional pencils, paint, paper, and canvas to be limiting in terms of surface and scale. At a time when everything from music to movies to books was becoming digitized, Millner used a stylus to hand-draw lines and used the computer as a repository for the drawings. These line drawings existed with no scale or color and only later would he shift their size, thickness, and assign color values.

Millner’s first such tree was drawn literally “en plein air” using a digital tablet, capturing simple branch and leaf contours. By reducing them to an outline, Millner synthesized its complex visual language, each element drawn individually and set floating in space, free from the background and each other. These he could later cobble together to reconstitute the entire tree. The computer allowed Milner to zoom in and out and draw at different scales simultaneously, facilitating details on the tiniest of branches and leaves. The artist could then play with layers, obscuring some and allowing others to emerge, their spatial relationships rendered through the size and detail of the objects. Millner then printed these images digitally as if they were photographs or archival inkjet prints, bringing to question if his works can be categorized as drawings, prints, or camera-less photographs.

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For this exhibition at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, Millner has created a new body of work that brings these investigations to the fore. These works present multiple layers of luscious vegetation, fauna, garden imagery, and ornate fountains embedded with forms simulating petalled birds and oversized feathers.

These motifs are flattened on the picture plane, with outlined forms floating on the ground, their implied perspective reminiscent of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. It is no coincidence the artist chooses to print his imagery on Japanese mulberry paper which he then mounts on canvas. The palette and associated gradients are inherent to natural botany with pinks, blues, greens, yellows, and browns surrounding and filling in the forms. Rainbow patterns are interspersed and insert themselves in certain spaces, conjuring the notion that colors in the light spectrum are omnipresent, even when not fully visible.

Some of the delineated shapes depicting figures, heads, fountains, and birds are intentionally left blank or can appear to have features filled in with pencil, their phantasmagoric forms immersed in the impenetrable organic patterns. These works are so intricate and densely occupied with line and color and ambiguous figure-ground relationships, much like Pointillistic works, they require the viewer to step back to take in the overall composition. The works require time and attention and there is discovery along the way.

Millner’s distinct visual language reflects the natural and human-made worlds, where narratives are not linear, with objects and space occupying and containing different histories over time. The artist skillfully toggles between the natural and digital worlds to present dreamlike scenes within a tangible world. By evoking a sense of nostalgia, Millner reminds us that the natural and the man-made are transient, occupying but a moment in the overall course of Time.

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About Heather Gaudio Fine Art

Heather Gaudio Fine Art specializes in emerging and established artists, offering painting, works on paper, photography, and sculpture. The gallery provides a full range of art advisory services, from forming and maintaining a collection to securing secondary market material to assisting with framing and installation. The focus is on each client, selecting art that best serves his or her vision, space, and resources. The six exhibitions offered every year are designed to present important talent and provide artwork appealing to a broad range of interests. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday; 10:30 am to 5:30 pm; and by appointment.

Time: 4:00-8:00 pm EST

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