Bulge 24, 2009

Holly Miller  

Holly Miller is an American abstract artist whose paintings seek to combine optics and the tactile thanks to a language of abstraction. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Miller has a Barchelors degree in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts of New York.

By combining lines of thread with colorful geometric shapes - including bright orange paintings- Miller's work carries several dichotomies: reductive painting and craftmanship, illusion and material, warm and cold, absence and presence, masculine and feminine, bold and subtle, perfection and imperfection... the physical appearance of her paintings can be described as monocromatic brush strokes and holes caused by the lines of thread that pierce the surface of the canvas, from far the canvases seem to be flat and seem to be made up of drawings composed of fine lines. However when you approach the painting, the observer is surprised and is tempted to look more closely and to reconsider the assumptions or the expectations that he made at first sight.

Although Miller was born in Buffalo, New York, she grew up in Rome, Italy. Communication through touch (body language) has always inspired her tactile abstract paintings. Her palette of colors are reminiscent of the tones and shades of Italian industrial design of the 60s and 70s. Her shapes resemble architecture and urban structures. Her work has an enormous affinity with Fontana's physical approach of paintings and to Burri's tactile minipulation of the surfaces. Ellsworth Kelly's bold shapes and colors influences her work at a purely optical level. Miller has always embraced and fused the sensibilities of different cultures through her own painting language.

Art critic from New York from Artcritical and Art Monkey Wrench, Deven Golden wrote about Miller's work: " Superhuman efforts are made to achieve uniformity, but it is human imperfection that is embraced and highlighted in every action... Holly Miller's practice offers a visual tactility that we can see floating in front of us without ever touching it"

Holly Miller has exhibited her work in solo exhibition mainly on the US east coast and abroad in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Serpentine Gallery in London and at the Miscetti Studio in Rome.