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John M. MILLER

John M. MILLER

Untitled

1996-97

magna on raw canvas
34 3/4 x 33"

Summary

Los Angeles artist John M. Miller [1939-2016] was best known for his geometric abstract art and compositions of repeating angled, colored bars on unprimed canvases. Miller paints abstract paintings—but not pictures—as pointed out by critic David Pagel,  “because they so successfully short-circuit references to events, ideas, or issues outside their own parameters...  Too complicated to be made sense of intellectually–especially when hue, structure, and proportion are perceived simultaneously–Miller’s art demands to be apprehended intuitively.” The dramatic structures in Miller’s paintings–made up of sharply angled bars regularly interspersed with pairs of shorter, more steeply inclined bars–charge the space they occupy with energy.  Not to be confused with Op art, these tranquil yet activated works present the possibility that your perceptual acuity may be decisively sharpened.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer wrote: “But beyond the referentiality of his geometric abstractions, what’s most dizzying about Miller’s paintings is the exuberant, ecstatic, unrelenting single-mindedness with which he has produced them, mantralike, for nearly four decades. And increasingly, it seems that the paintings aren’t so abstract after all, but rather are quite literal indexes of the persistence and mania that is their impetus. Ultimately, the artist’s labor and conviction in pattern—as an aesthetic mode and template for existence—are his real subjects.”