Mia Middleton(@miamiddleton) instagram tagged download

Sometimes what we don’t see is just as compelling as what we do🔥

@miamiddleton paints from vintage photography and theatrical imagery to create haunting scenes full of faceless figures, cropped perspectives, and mysterious gestures. The missing details leave us to fill in the blanks, making these paintings all the more intriguing. A little eerie, a little surreal, and a lot of heat🔥

#arttalk #artworld #artfan #fridayheaters

$Thank you @FlauntMagazine and @The_Unibrow for the thoughtful words on Mia Middleton's Summoning Cleo, the artist's second solo exhibition with @RobertsProjects in Los Angeles. Across paintings of arcane hinterlands, masked figures and dream-logic interiors, Summoning Cleo moves between the phantasmagoric and the material, conjuring a presence who is never quite pictured. Built over eighteen months, the exhibition traces grief, yearning and the slow rebuilding of faith, asking viewers not to resolve its disorientation but to surrender to it. Writing in The Unibrow, Evan Pricco reads the paintings as a kind of staged drama and arrives at a quiet, unsettling truth: "the fracturing is the scariest part." In Flaunt's Whisper to Me issue, Mia Middleton describes the work as an attempt to summon an entirely new world, an entirely new faith. Summoning Cleo is on view at @RobertsProjects through October 24. #ALMA #MiaMiddleton #RobertsProjects$

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#artcubeloves #MiaMiddleton who works in small-scale oil paintings that suspend ephemeral moments out of their context, inviting viewers into a psychological space poised between the conscious and the subconscious, desire and aversion, reality and fantasy. Each series begins with a slippery thought or feeling, with single-object still lifes and intimate freeze-frames serving as activators of dormant or concealed regions of the psyche, operating through the interplay of primal and domestic, somatic and cerebral elements. Her muddy, demure palette and monochromatic backgrounds locate subjects in a cloistered realm of pure interiority, building a visual language that wavers across emotions, generations, and chronologies without resolving into explicit narrative.
Middleton currently has a solo show at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. @miamiddleton @robertsprojects

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Middleton’s work: dualities, suspended time, threshold states

Mia Middleton is also included in our 2023 Discoveries Report, featuring the top 100 early-career artists ready to be discovered in 2023/2024 and beyond.

What tastemakers love (from our 2023 Discoveries Report):
‘Most of Mia’s works are small-scale with materials and textures taking the center stage. Her works are subtle and filled with intangible feelings and elusive thoughts. Looking at her works, I feel invited to reflect on my own internal world and engage with the enigmatic narratives she presents.’ - Chloe Chiu, Collector @chloechiu121

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Cleo is in the title and nowhere in the paintings. @miamiddleton Summoning Cleo at @robertsprojects is built on what she leaves out.

Covered heads, an arched foot, figures turned away from you. The same move Hammershøi made in his empty Copenhagen rooms, pushed somewhere stranger.

Also up in the group show Objective Truths: @aaronglasson working sand and beeswax into the paint, plus wendyredstar, @suchitramattaiart, Chris Johanson, Brenna Youngblood and Evan Nesbit.

442 S La Brea Ave, Los Angeles. Both shows close October 24.

Save this for your next gallery day and send it to whoever you’re going with.

#MiaMiddleton #ChrisJohanson #BrennaYoungblood #EvanNesbit #LosAngelesArt

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“Summoning Cleo” @miamiddleton #art #painting #universityofnewsouthwales #lisbon #london

Oil on linen

(ON VIEW THROUGH OCTOBER 24)

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$“Summoning Cleo, an exhibition of new work by Mia Middleton at Robert’s Projects. Combining intimate, intensely concentrated paintings with works made at a new and expanded scale, Middleton uses a shifting palette of theatrical reds and archival greys to articulate two thematic registers: the vitality of life and the systems that contain it. The paintings sustain the tension between these forces, allowing a quiet transmutation to emerge. In doing so, Summoning Cleo pushes the narrative structure to its limits, revealing how meaning persists even as coherence begins to fracture. Middleton’s visual language of cropped perspectives, isolated objects and suspended gestures draws on late-19th-century theatrical imagery and the early language of photography, often through anonymous vintage photographs discovered in markets, whose obscurity endures even through their reframing. Inspired by a pre-modern sensibility of embodied presence before the camera, Middleton’s compositions coalesce into an uncanny, almost dystopian play where context remains mysterious, and each figure seems both fixed in a moment and able to transcend time. By keeping figures anonymous and details fragmented, Middleton constructs phantasmagoric scenes that normalize distortion and ambiguity in place of logic and rationality.“$

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$At @robertsprojects,@miamiddleton artist sets the stage for a world of obscured faces, fractured narratives and uneasy drama in Summoning Cleo. On view in Los Angeles through October 24 👀 See more at The-Unibrow.com. Link in bio.  #TheUnbrow #MiaMiddleton$

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