dan miller

Dan Miller’s tireless creativity in superimposing considerable layers of writing to the point of illegibility has proved such a source of fascination for audiences that his art has now reached beyond the sphere of Art Brut to enter the permanent collection at MoMA in New York. While his work is highly contemporary in formal terms, with notable echoes of Pollock and Cy Twombly, Miller nonetheless invents his modes of expression outside the boundaries of mainstream artistic debate.

Dan Miller, born in Castro Valley in 1961, is autistic. He has been attending the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, for over fifteen years, giving entirely unfettered reign to his inventive imagination. He is obsessed with household objects such as light bulbs and electric sockets, the names of towns and cities, people, numbers, and foodstuffs. He pours his inner world onto the paper, intensely repeating its key signifiers in paint, pen, pencil, and felt tip.

The various media intertwine and pile up like the words themselves to create subtle strata of undeniable pictorial power. His works – in black and white or colour – reveal a rare dynamic force that seems to breathe new life into the body of the letters and the expressive power of words, above and beyond the lexical encryption caused by their accumulation.