Dan Miller - Recent Paintings

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to announce Dan Miller: Recent Paintings, 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.

The artist, who is on the autism spectrum, has developed an intensive body of work that employs language as its fundamental subject and departure-point. These intuitive yet rigorously executed paintings are an amalgamation of his thoughts and auto- biographical experiences, often centered on the elusive nature of tangible experience.

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.”

Dan Miller (USA, b. 1961) is included in Viva Arte Viva (curated by Christine Macel), at the 57th Venice Biennale. A prominent “Outsider” artist, his artwork is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), Berkeley, CA. He has received solo exhibitions at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York (2014), Galerie Christian Berst, Paris, France (2014), White Columns (2007), New York; and was included in Create (Curated by Lawrence Rinder, with Matthew Higgs) at BAM/PFA (2011).