HARLAND MILLER: On Overcoming Optimism 3 November 2012 – 26 January 2013

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HARLAND MILLER: On Overcoming Optimism

3 November 2012 – 26 January 2013

For Harland Miller’s first exhibition in Scotland, Ingleby Gallery presents a group of new paintings alongside a selected survey of the artist’s work across several years. Common to all of these paintings is a basic structure of shape borrowed from decades of Penguin paperbacks: a motif that automatically suggests a very British kind of nostalgia, but which Miller turns back on itself with invented titles that prove the dictum that you can’t judge a book, or a painting at least, by its cover.There’s humour in these paintings, but often of a fairly bleak kind, and a grim pathos balancing out Miller’s instinctively irreverent wit. They are funny, and sometimes, unexpectedly, they are sad – a moment of melancholy shifting the pace – but always they are painted with a sense of Miller’s delight in the physical act of painting itself, and a loving respect for the book as an object.

For all the pop art implications of book covers carrying words, Miller’s paintings nod to what he describes as a “sleeves-rolled-up kind of painting”. Fighting against their own formality with a fluid delight in the sweeps, drips and smudges of paint, they suggest a debt to the painterly legacy of de Kooning and Rothko as much as to the textual polish of Ed Ruscha.

Miller is both a writer and artist (his debut novel Slow Down Arthur Stick to Thirty was published in 2000) and his paintings of books simultaneously provide a subject for the painter and an outlet for the writer. They combine the emotive possibilities of abstract expressionism with the quick punch of words to deliver their message, and for all the macho grist of their making, and often overwhelming scale, they somehow express a frailty that hints at the human condition. As Miller has said: “Painting is the worst medium to express narrative, but perhaps the best to hit a nerve”.
Harland Miller was born in Yorkshire in 1964. He has lived in New York and Berlin and currently lives and works in London.

Images: You Can Rely on Me – I’ll Always Let You Down, 2011  (oil on canvas, 236 x 157 cm) / Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore, 2012 (oil on canvas, 234 x 155 cm)

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GALLERY II
KEVIN HARMAN
3 November – 22 December 2012

Kevin Harman (b.1982) is a Scottish artist who creates works that intrigue, delight and provoke in equal measure. Harman’s work frequently has an element of performance, even if the performance itself remains unseen until unveiled by the artwork. In this he confronts the barriers between the act of creation and the act of experience – linking the art and the audience in a moment of shared discovery.
Exploring the everyday to find the extraordinary, Harman works across media, often using the very objects in which he finds his inspiration as the principle component of his artworks. Harman’s sculptures, prints, films and drawings serve as trophies of the creative process, giving us cause to consider the act of making as equally as important as the end product.
Harman graduated with an MFA in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. His project 24/7, was commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival 2012 and his first exhibition at Ingleby Gallery will be in Gallery II from 3 November – 22 December 2012.
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