John Miller

John Miller
Everything Is Painted Brown

7 April - 1 May 2004

John Miller's exhibition at Metro Pictures, Everything Is Painted Brown, includes the brown impasto paintings, reliefs, and sculptures he executed from 1985 through 1994. This show marks the first time this influential work has been shown together. The goopy impasto surface and monochromatic brown color of these pieces form a structural framework that is symbolic of the infantile and elemental, and within the art context alludes to Abstract Expressionism, Earthworks, as well as Actionism.

Miller's efforts are complex explorations difficult to reduce to a singular identifiable style. He plunders the language of our visual culture in an intellectual journey that has led him to cross all borders of style, medium, form, and appearance. Recent installations have focused on the extreme exaggerations of television game shows, with their sadly unreal world of tacky sets, frenzied participants and smarmy hosts. He has been simultaneously engaged in an ongoing work Middle of the Day that includes several hundred photographs of diverse locations and differing subjects taken at the shadowless, lunch-break period. Other work has included sensitively rendered pencil drawings of architectural types; genre paintings and drawings; deconstructions of personals ads; sculptural accretions of objects and shapes covered in colorful plastic fruit and flowers.

John Miller lives and works in New York and Berlin. One person shows include: Center for Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kunstverien, Hamburg; DAAD Galerie, Berlin; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Magasin-Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France, accompanied by a retrospective catalogue. His work was included in the Whitney Biennials in 1985 and 1991. Miller is a widely published writer and critic. The Middle of the Day photographs are the subject of an upcoming publication by JRP Editions. This publication will complete a boxed set, accompanying books published in 1996 and 2000.