Harland Miller

Harland Miller is a British artist and author, born in 1964, who is best known for his large-scale, photo-realistic paintings, posters, and prints of vintage Penguin book covers. A critically acclaimed novelist as well as an influential painter, his practice explores the combination of image and text, similar in scope to American artist Edward Ruscha. The covers he paints often feature his own invented, sardonic titles combined with the iconic Penguin logo. His muted tones and painterly brushstrokes imbue his canvases with the worn character of a used book, yet often convey subversive sociopolitical critiques. Born in 1964 in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, Miller received both his BA and MA from the Chelsea College of Art in London, where he currently lives and works. His solo exhibitions include those held at the White Cube in London, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, among others.

Artist and writer Harland Miller’s polychromatic and graphically vernacular paintings have garnered a devoted following. Infused with irreverent northern English humour and refined by his lifelong love of language, Miller’s work synthesises references from both high and low culture, spanning literature, music, self-help manuals and medieval iconography. Attesting to his deep-rooted engagement with the narrative, aural and typographical possibilities of language, Miller expressed, ‘People read before they can stop themselves, it’s automatic. Words offer a way into what you’re looking at, but no matter how integrated the text is, no matter how much you might think it’s synthesised into the painting, there is this imbalance in terms of how much the words are doing as words.’