John Miller (1954, Cleveland, OH, USA).
Lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany.

John Miller is an artist, critic, and musician who has challenged the conventional approaches of conceptual art since the early 1980s.

Miller obtained his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977, participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1978, and earned an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Alongside his classmates and friends Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, Miller was part of an influential cohort of artists who studied at CalArts in the 1970s.

Throughout his 30 years career, Miller has created a diverse body of work that engages with language, value systems, social hierarchies, and the concept of abjection. His exploration of identity, economics, and social class is consistently present in his sculptures, photographs, paintings, and installations.

Miller is most renowned for a series of relief assemblages that he initiated in the mid-1980s. These works involve a thick, paste-like layer of brown paint coating assemblages constructed from found objects and inexpensive synthetic merchandise concealed just beneath the surface. The resulting compositions resemble a messy, earth-like amalgamation with a granular impasto. As his practice evolved, Miller adopted a tendency to work in series, often employing and reusing a singular motif.

In 2008, Miller introduced gold leaf gilding into his wall reliefs and sculptures, incorporating golden architectural objects and household items. These gleaming surfaces evoke a primal attraction to metallic shimmer, drawing the viewer’s eye. However, upon closer examination, the objects covered in gold reveal their cheapness and convey a somewhat apocalyptic quality. By playing with the notions of authenticity and falsity, Miller’s works exhibit his ambivalence towards capitalism and the commodification of art within consumer culture.

John Miller was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Society for Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2011. In 1991, he received a Fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). His work was presented at the Gwangju Biennale (2010), Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2005) and the Whitney Biennial (1985, 1991).

John Miller is currently Professor of Professional Practice in Art History at Barnard College (New York).

Selected public and private collections:

Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank (Frankfurt, Germany)
FRAC Bretagne (Rennes, France)
Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, FL, USA)
MAMCO Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland)
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY, USA)
Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland)
Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany)
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY, USA)
Pangea Consortium (Zürich, Switzerland)
Ringier Collection (Zürich, Switzerland)
Rubell Museum (Miami, FL, USA)
Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Whitney Museum (New York, NY, USA)