Harland Miller
dal 21/1/2002 al 2/3/2002
Segnalato da
21/1/2002
Harland Miller
White Cube, London
White Cube is pleased to present a new group of paintings by Harland Miller. Miller is perhaps best known as a writer, coming to the fore with his recent novel, 'Slow down Arthur, Stick to Thirty'. This exhibition will focus on Miller's work as a painter and will include a selection of his recent paintings based on the dust jackets of classic Penguin paperbacks.
"To Jean,
A Small Memento of a Great Effort,
Love Alan"
23.01.02 - 02.03.02
White Cube is pleased to present a new group of paintings by Harland Miller. Miller is perhaps best
known as a writer, coming to the fore with his recent novel, 'Slow down Arthur, Stick to Thirty'. This
exhibition will focus on Miller's work as a painter and will include a selection of his recent paintings
based on the dust jackets of classic Penguin paperbacks.
Penguin paperbacks were instrumental in the democratisation of the published word, first appearing
in the summer of 1935. Costing only sixpence, the equivalent price of a packet of cigarettes, they
covered biography, crime and fiction and were colour coded for easy classification. The colour of the
band on the cover denoted the type of book - biography being dark blue, crime green and fiction
orange. These reasonable books became instant classics, passing through generations of readers
symbolising a kind of barter or gift economy between friends and family. Whilst Miller's paintings
take the form of Penguin paperbacks, their simple bands of colour also, curiously, reflect the colour
field painting of the 1950s. Although his canvases are visually emphatic, reflecting a kind of Abstract
Expressionist flatness, they also blur the boundaries between the visual and the textual since they
are ultimately representational - a kind of hybrid activity that reflects Miller's career as a whole being
both a writer and a visual artist. Painterly and soft-edged, his pictures evoke the way books and
paperbacks in particular become personalised with the marks of their owners where the dog-ears,
coffee stains and inscriptions (such as the one chosen for the title of the exhibition) transform the
universal into something intensely personal.
In 2000 Miller exhibited at Fig.-1 and for this exhibition he produced a novella based on his sister
who suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder after discovering a box full of Polaroid
photographs of the knobs on a cooker that she had taken. The photographs were his sister's method
of checking whether the cooker had been turned off after she had left for work and Miller exhibited
them alongside the transcript of the short story that he wove around them.
Miller studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and after graduating with an MA, left England to live
abroad, working as an artist in New York, Berlin and New Orleans. His first novel, Slow Down Arthur,
Stick to Thirty was published by Fourth Estate. Miller is currently writing a new novel, 'Reclaim the
Night', based on the true story of a community of transsexual prostitutes living in Leeds during the
time of the Yorkshire Ripper. He is currently writer in residence at the ICA where he is producing an
illustrated anthology of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, as well as a series of Poe-related events
that will start on Poe's birthday, October 8, next year.
Preview Tuesday 22nd January 6-8pm
For further information please contact Alexandra Bradley or Honey Luard on 020 7930 5373.
Open
Tuesday to Saturday, 10am - 6pm.
White Cube
44 Duke Street, St James's,
London SW1Y 6DD