Jovana Millay

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Levitation, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Jovana Millay.

Millay will present a suite of new paintings and sculptures. Eleven in total, a number signifying illumination, inspiration and spiritual enlightenment. Known for her hard edge abstractions and luminous surfaces, the artist uses a minimal aesthetic to explore material, line, and subtle shifts in color eliciting a kind of emotional lyricism and spirituality.

After developing a narrow set of formal parameters Millay uncovers limitlessness and new discoveries emerge from within each painting. Spatially constrained by an identical semicircular curve on either end, Millay playfully doubles, elongates, and rotates the repeated shape from picture to picture. The putty-colored ground expands and contracts around the obrounds adding a sense of movement. Her unique masking technique slowly builds up delicate ridges that outline and bisect the seductive pastel apertures with each coat of meticulously applied paint and are suggestive of landscapes, bodies, cells, pills, and architectural details.

Millay’s paintings offer viewers the opportunity to travel through portals, beckoning them to sink into the canvas and experience what she describes as “unknown spatial realms, endlessly deep, and meditative.” The wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures extend her painterly experiments; it is as if the forms literally leapt off the wall and began moving around the room, challenging conventions of two dimensional image making.

Jovana Millay studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her BFA from Wheaton College. She lives and works in Los Angeles.