Milli Jannides

Journals etched with dreams, postcards of museum objects, and a novel dog-eared with favoured passages: here are markers of an artist whose work dovetails language, meaning, and resonance. There are other objects too – horsehair brushes, linseed, and oils – old elements, called together...

Milli Jannides (1986) grew up in Tāmaki Makaurau, raised by a family of theatermakers – a telling context for the painter who stages pictorial invention.

The canvased worlds of Jannides are arranged through brushwork that is scratchy, drawn, washy and layered in divergent colour. Through this expansive language of paint, Jannides crafts literary ciphers that appear as visual allegories – a seeing eye, crossroads, or an ascending ladder. Other codes appear too – allusions of intimacy – a beloved mother, forms of pregnancy, even the light of an unfamiliar land. Jannides’ paintings are awash with readings, as narrative journeys are carried to loose ends and abstraction.

Among the signs and symbols are memories of other paintings, Modernist pasts of impressionism, expressionism, and symbolism – all genres burdened with patriarchal ‘mastery'. The hope lingers, and another dream resides here, as Jannides reaches for a mark that can speak true of a person, and reveal something otherwise obscured. In the language of ‘inner worlds’, Jannides adds to the visual realm some thoughts, feelings, and intuitions that are: female, in flux, in and out of tune, open-minded.

After studying Fine Arts and Literature at the University of Auckland, Jannides was a guest student in Peter Doig’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and received a Masters in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2013. An itinerant life has led her to various countries over the past decade, experiences which have fed into the paintings and exhibitions she has made in Aotearoa and abroad.

Recent solo exhibitions include Far Flung, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2021) and Winter, Winter, Spring, McLeavey Gallery, Wellington (2021). Group exhibitions include Painting: A Transitive Space, St. Paul St Gallery, AUT, Auckland (2016), Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (2015) and Sound Bow (with Ruth Buchanan), Johan Berggren, Malmö (2014).

Jannides is currently based in Auckland having recently returned from living in Stockholm, Sweden.