Statement
Dan Miller’s artwork is an intricate abstract biography that reflects his perceptions. Diagnosed with severe autism, and with few conventional verbal communication skills, Miller has developed a working method that uses language as its primary subject and departure-point.
Letters and words are repeatedly overdrawn, creating ink-layered masses that hover on the page and are built up to the point of illegibility or destruction of the ground. Each drawing thereby becomes a written recording of the artist’s obsessions, a visceral accumulation of texts and numerical sequences that often have strong personal references, e.g. aspects from his daily routine, names of people from his family history, or specific Bay Area locales. For Miller, it is not only important to express words visually— objects like light bulbs, hardware tools, and food appear constantly in his work—but to also hear them repeated back in conversation. Miller’s recent work made using a manual typewriter transforms the legibility of his texts, and like a key to his drawings, radically expands the formal methodologies at play. In addition to drawing and painting, Miller works in a variety of media including ceramics, wood sculpture, and textiles.
Miller’s work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Collection De L’Art Brut, Lausanne and is included in the private collections of David Byrne, Cindy Sherman, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner, Nicolas Rohatyn and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Andy and Kate Spade among many others. Miller has had solo exhibitions in New York at Ricco|Maresca Gallery and White Columns, New York and has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, The Museum of Everything, London, Partners and Spade, New York, Gallery Paule Anglim, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, and ABCD, Paris.
|
