Greg Miller

Pep Up, Red

2015

Greg Miller grew up in '50s– and '60s–era Sacramento, inspired by the rush of billboards, posters, ads and text that shaped the flat delta landscapes and pulp fiction images of his youth. Layer upon layer of images — one billboard or poster slapped over the next — formed a sort of cultural geology, where the passage of time might jumble, conceal and reveal an archeology of images, their stories hidden and hinted at in the remaining fragments.

Labeled a “neo-Pop” and “post-Pop” artist by such critics as Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank, Miller does indeed draw from pop cultural imagery that saturated American consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time when advertising and text became indelibly encrypted into our experience of everyday life. Life as “advertised” and life as “lived” became insuperably intertwined on the pages of LIFE and LOOK magazines, on television shows, commercials, billboards, hotel signs, romance novels and even matchbook covers as never before. Miller’s paintings excavate this imagery and often appear as unreconstructed fragments of these signs, drips, patterns and phrases.

Miller’s work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation.

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(Biography provided by William Turner Gallery)