Pippi Miller’s two earlier exhibitions in 2023 and 2024 with Olga Gallery suggested a coming of age in which the artist looks back at the experiences of childhood and adolescence. In the artist’s 2025 exhibition, ‘Taking Advantage of Poor Light’, a collection of paintings marked by a recent visit to Europe, we find the artist grappling with young adulthood as a period of increasing solitude and perplexity.
 
The technique and approach represent a refinement over the earlier work continuing the quasi-theatrical strategies announced in the 2024 exhibition: each image evokes a longer narrative that remains untold, developing an elaborate mise-en-scène of significant dramaturgical intensity, carefully plotted from the work’s inception. 
 
The artist systematically, and deliberately, undermines the trompe-l’oeil dimension of the carefully constructed interiors. The meticulously documented parquet floors, for example, seem to be on the verge of falling out of the frame, an implicit acknowledgement of the modernist and post-modernist legacy that underlies the artist’s oeuvre.
 
Recurrent objects, here most obviously a set of wings, reappear consistently among the works, the wings referencing both Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, a 1987 film, and the famous Berlin statue, known as the Victory Column (Siegessäule). The Cupid (Eros), a winged figure drawn from Greek mythology, appears on the t-shirt of a young woman riding the U-Bahn and is also the tile of a painting that depicts a rendezvous between an impossibly androgynous young man (recalling New Zealand musician Connan Mockasin in his heyday) and a nude woman who in appearance evokes a youthful Audrey Hepburn, also androgynous, if also obviously feminine. 
 
If the wings suggest a certain optimism, especially when adorning an androgynous Cupid/angel, the painting titled ‘Death Becomes Her’ suggests another ending and incorporates the traditional elements of paintings meditating on the injunction ‘Memento mori’, (translated as ‘Remember you must die’, a favourite theme in 17th century art). The skull, the scythe, and the hourglass are images that, especially within the Memento mori tradition, suggest the finite limits of human existence, at least for those who chose to pursue the transient pleasures of corporeal existence. (Note: thoughts of death, memento mori, on the part of Barbie Margot trigger the narrative of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, 2023. The young seem to have death on their minds these days.)
 
Equally, the paintings also contain carefully executed elements recalling the scenes that Miller traversed in her travels: a wall covered in graffiti, a scene of the Hebrides coastline, the Ostkreuz station in Berlin. Corporeal existence is an insistent motif in this series, which never ceases to bring us back to the mundane, the requisite O.E. undertaken by all aspiring New Zealanders.
 
Miller asks us to contemplate what life holds for a generation who came of age in the third decade of the twenty-first century, in a world in which the traditional values of Humanism, and a liberal arts education, have been systematically questioned and undermined. Imbued with a deep sense of the history of European culture, the series ‘Taking Advantage of Poor Light’ characterises the postcolonial legacy of the British empire as, to quote the title of Rudyard Kiping’s first novel, ‘the light that failed’.