By Rachel Silva

In a world where bravado can often be measured by size, a new trend in interior design is challenging the market’s appetite for grandiosity. Enter the tiny painting trend, where instead of overcrowding a space with a sprawling gallery wall or imposing piece, there’s a growing interest in smaller, more intimate kinds of art. In 2018, there was a marked push towards larger paintings, and now we’re seeing it everywhere like Lisbon-based Mia Middleton who makes small-scale photorealist freeze frames.

By Alexandra English

“Mia’s works are smaller in scale and she describes them as freeze-frame moments. She thinks of her paintings as pinpricks of information that allude to a larger whole. She draws on experience and memory – there’s a bit of fantasy and they have this luscious quality to them.”

In conversation with the artist, exploring multiple themes and delving into the deep subconscious sphere. The oneiric and psychological realms can be intricate and mysterious, thus providing fertile ground for artistic expression. Alongside the inner soul of her works and that aura of mystery, Mia opens a window to see what lies within her life and personal imprint.

By Adrienne Gaffney

Mia Middleton thinks about the things we don’t understand. Her small-scale paintings feature monochromatic palettes, fuzzy tones, and disembodied scenes. “There’s definitely meant to be something there that’s eluding comprehension,” says Middleton, who was raised in New Zealand and London and is now based in Lisbon. After studying at the University of New South Wales, she focused on sculpture and installation. She hadn’t studied painting in school and was nervous about venturing into it. 

Roberts Projects announced representation of Australian artist Mia Middleton, whose pictorial works explore interiority, memory and evocation. Middleton’s small-scale paintings capture a tension and threshold between conscious and subconscious, desire and aversion, reality and fantasy. The gallery will exhibit a series of works alongside other artists at Art Basel Miami Beach this December. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Middleton’s work–Love Story–this past April. 

By Eve Wood 

Mia Middleton’s first solo exhibition at Roberts Projects, “Love Story,” reads like a primer for the quietly majestic instances in life that so often pass us by without our noticing, harkening back to a time when life was considerably less frenzied and probably more fulfilling. 

As the title of the show suggests, each of the small paintings in this exhibition contains its own unique love story—a visual paean to the ordinary objects that populate our all-too-busy lives, and often define us whether we like it or not. 

By Samuel Anderson

While some small paintings seem to resist their physical limitations, others embrace them with matter-of-fact immediacy. Such is the case with the work of Mia Middleton, a sculptor turned painter whose single-object still-lifes offer a litany of strange, one-off encounters. Yet Middleton’s work is far from realist. Her paintings’ monochromatic backgrounds locate her subjects in the cloistered-off realm of the artist’s imagination, if anywhere at all. “Most of my paintings are a composite of photographs, life, and imagined elements,” Middleton said. “Other times, a composition emerges fully formed in my mind, like a vision.”