Dan Miller: Recent Paintings

Dan Miller: Recent Paintings is a solo exhibition of paintings by the Oakland-based artist. This show will be installed in our Project Rooms and presents an edited selection of works on paper (2012-17) as well as a monumental scroll painted earlier this year by Miller at the Creative Growth Art Center. This is Dan Miller’s second show at the gallery and in Los Angeles.

 

Dan Miller enfolds gesture and text in compositions that articulate an innate and pure 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.

 

He immerses repeated words and symbolic motifs in a vigorous palette of acrylics, inks and graphite.   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.”