Chris Millar: Mirthful Miscellanea
Since 2017 Chris Millar has developed a series of ambitious, visually stunning, materially dense, and impeccably crafted sculptural paintings. Mirthful Miscellanea, the third in the series, is the largest and most technically accomplished and enchanting to date.
Packed with references drawn from music, literature, science, Millar’s daily life, his relationships with friends and family, and most importantly his insatiable curiosity about the “interconnectedness and fantastic strangeness of life” the work is nothing short of spectacular.
Millar states, “The purpose of my art is to rekindle that sense of awe and wonder we had before the trials and tribulations of growing older muted that sense of magic, before we delineated between imagination and the actual. My works are intended to reinvigorate that feeling of experiencing something singularly spellbinding for the first time.”
The writer and curator Shannon R. Stratton has written of Millar’s work, “At full blast, his work pushes at the limits of stimulation and pleasure but always holds back from total failure or collapse. It is as if each project and each decision within each project, he walks a kind of artistic tightrope – stubbornly virtuosic in its making, yet anarchic in its profusion.” Few artists have ventured into such extremes of making in their work: Evan Penny, Luanne Martineau, Phillip Guston, Agnes Martin…
Please join Chris Millar and TrépanierBaer for the release of Mirthful Miscellanea, Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 11:30 a.m.
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Chris Millar was born in Claresholm, Alberta and currently lives and works in Montréal. He completed a Fine Arts Diploma in 1998 at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton, Alberta and his BFA at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary in 2000. Painted with gestures of excess, Millar’s works are immoderate, and at heart, ridiculous. Pulling from formal influences such as comic books, rock music, video games, television, the art world and pop culture in general, Millar’s paintings put spoof through a blender, chewing up narrative arcs and spitting them back out in a vortex of idiom, ribaldry and farce. Building his paintings through a multitude of processes and acrylic layers, Millar’s craft is impeccable. His fetishistic, outrageously decadent illustrations of human-folly are both overwhelming and seductive, the ultimate construction for a turbo-culture world.
Chris Millar has exhibited across Canada and the United States. Solo exhibitions of note include Lost a cartful, Found a wagonload, TrépanierBaer Gallery (2014); The Untimely Transmogrification of the Problem, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2012); and Boiyd Howses and Other Hatstands, ThreeWalls Gallery, Chicago (2007). His work was included in the recent group exhibitions, A Look Within: The Vision of Alberta Collectors, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2024); Fait main / Hand Made, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City (2018); as well as Made in Calgary: The 2000s, Glenbow Museum; Calgary (2014); and in Oh, Canada at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2012/13). His work figures in many private and public institutions across Canada, including: the National Gallery of Canada, Glenbow Museum, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Royal Bank of Canada, and the Claridge Collection, to name a few.
Chris Millar
Mirthful Miscellanea, 2024
Resin, acrylic paint, brass, steel, aluminum, electronics, wood
60” x 22” x 16”
Image courtesy Jacques Bellavance