Photo: Ben Westoby
Courtesy of White Cube
About the Work
In this screenprint, painter Harland Miller returns to his usual subject of book covers and the graphic process of printmaking. Based on a large-sized watercolor painting by Miller, the intimate color silkscreen print characterizes the abstract color designs that Penguin once used for its paperbacks, while retaining the painterly qualities of his work. The publisher’s signature penguin teeters precipitously in a sea of bright fuscia, while the stark, wryly humorous title asks us to consider the metaphysical question that lies ahead of us all.
About the Artist
Harland Miller is both a writer and an artist, practicing both roles over a peripatetic career in Europe and America. After living and exhibiting in New York, Berlin, and New Orleans during the 1980s and '90s, Miller achieved critical acclaim with his debut novel in 2000, Slow down Arthur, Stick to Thirty. In the same year he published a small novella, First I was Afraid, I was Petrified. A year later Miller produced a series of paintings based of the dust jackets of Penguin books.
In 2008 Miller curated a group exhibition, You dig the tunnel, I’ll hide the soil to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Edgar Allen Poe. Staged across two venues, White Cube Hoxton and Shoreditch Town Hall, Miller exhibited several new works in 2008, including an installation in Hoxton Square that deceived many visitors. I Was Always Good at Finding Things I comprised seven live forensic figures inside a cordoned area, examining it for evidence of a mysterious crime. In the following year Miller turned his attention to the police campaign mounted against the infamous "Yorkshire Ripper" in 1978 that had been misconstrued by the hoax letters and tapes sent by John Samuel Humble a.k.a Wearside Jack from the North East. For his exhibition at the BALTIC, Miller painted a series of large billboards entitled The Consequence of a Failed Illusion (West Yorkshire Police Public Information Campaign) which, over time, had been ripped to reveal adverts, catch-phrases, and imagery amongst samples of Wearside Jack’s writing or emergency number to call and listen to his voice.
Miller has participated in group shows at the Royal Academy in London, Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany, and the ICA London. His solo exhibitions include shows at White Cube, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Artin Gateshead.
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