Dan Miller: Paintings

Dan Miller: Paintings

April 13 – May 25, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, April 13th, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm 

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to announce our fourth solo presentation of paintings and works on paper by Dan Miller, a prominent ‘Outsider’ artist who is based in the Bay Area. Miller is a developmentally disabled artist (he has autism) who works in a variety of media and employs an abstracted visual language as a tool of inquiry and expression. This exhibition of ten major paintings commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the Creative Growth Art Center, the Oakland non-profit where Miller has been an artist-in-residence for thirty years.

Miller immerses repeated words and symbolic motifs in a vigorous palette of acrylics, inks and graphite. These intuitive yet rigorously executed paintings are an amalgamation of his thoughts and autobiographical experiences, often centered on the elusive nature of tangible experience. He enfolds gesture and text in vibrant compositions that articulate an innate language. His artwork reflects his perceptions -- letters and words are repeatedly overdrawn, often creating ink-layered masses, hovering on the page and built up to the point of obliteration or destruction of the ground. Each work contains the written recording of the artist’s obsession with objects like light bulbs, electrical sockets, food and the names of cities and people. 

As the art historian Jennifer Borum writes, “[Miller] also uses paint, varying his palette to add texture to his already explosive sensibility. Layered elements appear to be in a constant flux: emerging into view while being scratched out of existence. Simultaneously poetic and artistic, expressive and conceptual, his work renders distinctions between such categories meaningless. [He is] an Outsider who continues to gain international attention in both artistic and literary worlds.”

Dan Miller (USA, b. 1961) was included in Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel, at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). In addition to the acquisition by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Miller’s paintings, textiles, and typed drawings are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NYC; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Folk Art Museum, NYC; the Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), CA; the Mad Musée, and the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, CH. The artist has received solo exhibitions at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; White Columns, Andrew Edlin, and Ricco/Maresca Gallery, all in NYC; and Galerie Christian Berst Art Brut, Paris. His work was included in exhibitions at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, and Jennifer Lauren Gallery, London, UK; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, curated by Matthew Higgs, Sheboygan, WI; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; BAMPFA, Berkeley; The Museum of Everything, London; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rachel Uffner Gallery and Partners & Spade, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, Jules Maeght and 836M in San Francisco; and Galerie Christian Berst and ABCD, Paris.