Paton Miller / Around the World in 40 Years / Against the Algorithm

Art Ventures Gallery is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, Around the World in 40 Years / Against the Algorithm, new paintings by modern realist Paton Miller, at Art Ventures Gallery, 888 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025, from February 1, 2017 through March 25.

Menlo Park, CA – January 9, 2017

Paton Miller, acclaimed modern realist painter based in Southampton New York, is the first artist to participate in the Art Ventures Gallery Program. In addition to showing Miller’s paintings, Art Ventures will exhibit a suite of drawings, drenched in mystery and never before published. Paton Miller is available for media interviews, upon appointment.

According to Art Ventures Gallery owner Katharina Powers, “What strikes me looking at Paton Miller’s artwork is the purity of his dramatic landscapes. Paton provides an antidote to the so-called “filter bubble” in which this generation, growing up with the Internet, lives. Paton’s work provides a respite from the Internet and takes us out of algorithmized isolation. He takes us on a journey, and shows us what life is about.”

Writing in Art News, noted critic Donald Kuspit, said about Paton Miller’s work, “These pictures make clear a familiar, but often forgotten point: that the expressivity of a representational scene often depends upon the abstract intensity generated in response to the medium. Without this visionary intensity, representational painting can become a kind of perceptual journalism. It becomes all the more important when the artist is picturing inner rather than overt horror. The achievement of ecstatic abstractness also indicates that the artist is master of the scene, rather than overwhelmed by what she or he is rendering — to make it appear magically upon command, which is what Miller’s version of realism does.”

The son of an airline pilot, Paton Miller grew up in Hawaii, and since the 1970’s, has lived in Southampton, Long Island where he surfs, paints, and teaches. Paton Miller’s work has been awarded the Painting Award at the Florence Biennale and is in public collections at American Embassy in Abu Dhabi and Bogotá, Colombia. Recent exhibitions include shows at White Room Gallery, NYC; Gallery Shchunkin, NYC; Galerie Yoram Gil, Beverly Hills; and Horwitch Newman Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ.

Following the opening of his exhibit at the Art Ventures Gallery in Menlo Park, Miller will be in residence at the Art Ventures studio in Saint Helena from July through August. While there, Miller can engage with other visiting artists in the residency program, and create new work. In a program unique in the Bay Area art world, Art Ventures combines a purpose built painting studio where rising art stars can work in complete freedom with