Holly Miller

The Times

2020

Holly Miller is an American abstract artist, whose paintings strive to merge the optical with the tactile through the language of abstraction. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Communication through the touch (body language) has inspired her tactile abstract paintings. Miller's palette echoes the tones and hues of Italian industrial design from the 60s and 70s, while her shapes recall architecture and urban structures. Her work has a huge affinity to Fontana's physical approach to his paintings and Burri's tactile manipulation of the painting's surface. Ellsworth Kelly's bold shapes and colors have resonated with her on a purely optical level. Agnes Martin’s subtle, quiet, repetitive drawn lines, Fred Sandback’s strong architectural, minimal fiber lines drawn in space, Eva Hesse’s emotionally loaded structured webs, Richard Tuttle’s quirky and fresh drawings and humble objects, Bridget Riley's dynamic, optical compositions have left a deep impression on Miller, inspiring her to carve out her own voice in Abstraction. By combining repeated threaded lines with geometric shapes of color, her work conveys many dichotomies: reductive painting and craft, illusion and material, warm and cool, absence and presence, masculine and feminine, bold and subtle, perfection and imperfection. The paintings have a physicality that is described through the monochromatic brush strokes and the punctured holes of the drawn lines that pierce the surface of the canvas, yet from a distance, they appear to be flat and suggest a fine line drawing. As one approaches the paintings an element of surprise is revealed and one is inspired to look closer and question the original assumption or expectation.