In Mia Middleton’s spectral new paintings, an unseen figure seems to linger just out of sight.
This absent character becomes a centrifugal force, pulling at the world around her, unraveling the rules of physics and biology. Birds fall to the ground, bright skies darken, and flowers grow in unexpected places.
Over the past five years, Middleton, who is based in Lisbon, has earned a reputation for her cinematic, small-scale paintings. These are enigmatic scenes—unworn shoes, the nape of a neck, a lone balloon—painted in theatrical hues of crimson and gray. Each work feels like a small pinprick.
The Interval, 2026
Mia Middleton
Roberts Projects
Screen Memory, 2026
Mia Middleton
Roberts Projects
Now the artist is bringing these effects into a much larger scale in “Summoning Cleo,” her second solo exhibition with Roberts Projects, which opens in Los Angeles later this week. It’s an effort to grapple with equally enormous experiences of grief and loss that presented deep, existential challenges.
Over the past few years, Middleton experienced two miscarriages—losses that profoundly rocked her world view. “My beliefs and faith were tested in a way they’d never been before,” she said on a video call. She was, she explained, “confronting [her] own mortality in ways I hadn’t before.”
The artist and her partner began referring to their fertility journey as “summoning Cleo,” referencing an imaginary baby name. “The term ‘summoning’ felt right because we were doing all this hidden, ineffable ritual magic to try to succeed,” she explained.
Middleton said she felt her previous belief systems, a mix of philosophical beliefs which she called “syncretic,” collapsed under the weight of her losses and their compounded grief. “They weren’t built for what I was going through,” she said.
The show’s titular painting is based on a 1949 photograph of a group of people outside at night standing together, with arms linked, doing a dance. “It’s got a sense of ritual, almost like pagan ritual in it,” said the artist.
She also leans on folkloric influences to conjure her sense of unseen forces at work around her. One painting, Augury (all works 2026), references the ancient Roman practice of reading birds in flight for omens. It shows a small black bird dead on the ground, with two large drops of blood nearby.
Middleton also found meaning in the lives and writings of the saints. She took particular inspiration from Saint Catherine of Bologna, who believed divinity could be reached through hardship. Referring to Saint Catherine’s book The Seven Spiritual Weapons, one painting in the show is titled Fifth Weapon, which the saint calls “the remembrance that we must die—an omen of mortality not as despair, but as what clarifies life.” The painting shows the darkened silhouette of a man in a hat.
Cherub (Puppenkind), 2026
Mia Middleton
Roberts Projects
A Concentrated Body, 2026
Mia Middleton
Roberts Projects
In contrast to her previous works, these paintings can be large, stretching up to 45 by 58 inches. Before she started, the artist assumed scaling up would mean working more slowly, “bit by bit.” Instead, she found that approach broke the fluidity of her process of wet-on-wet painting. Instead, she had to treat the larger canvases the same way she treats her small ones: a single sustained session, sometimes preceded by a week of mental preparation, followed by long 10- to 12-hour days of painting.
Other elements of her process have remained the same. Middleton has often based paintings on vintage photographs, a process that continues here, and reflects her interest in archives and the past. In 19th- and early 20th-century photographs she finds a peculiar relationship to truth. She sees these images as at once constructed and stripped bare. “People were so exposed in front of the lens at that time,” explained the artist, referring to them as “time capsules carrying gestures and atmospheres forward from another world’s logic.” In the painting A Broken Step, Middleton depicts the body of a woman paused midstep. The painting is drawn from a theater photograph of Le Train Bleu (1924), a one-act ballet choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, and offers a haunting, grayscale image of hesitation.
While her paintings of single, evocative subjects had long explored ideas of fragmentation, she felt for the first time that she could only focus on small shards of experience. “It wasn’t just a theoretical or ontological orientation for me anymore,” she said. “These were the smallest units of meaning that I actually had to work with.”
“When you’re so depressed, so dark, only the most insistent things will pass through to you that will actually allow themselves to be made,” explained Middleton.
As a result, she found herself gathering scraps of ritual rather than committing to one system. She turned to Gaelic traditions, too, as in Leaba Bríde. In the tradition, a small bed with a doll is left by the hearth overnight as a fertility charm, inviting the blessing of Saint Brigid. In Middleton’s painting, the doll and the saint are absent, but the bed itself has become the offering, its blankets giving way to a tangle of wildflowers. The last painting completed for “Summoning Cleo,” the image is not one of healing so much as rebirth and possibility where we least expect it.
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