International Lonely Guy - Hardcover

Miller, Harland

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0847829286 ISBN 13: 9780847829286

Publisher: Rizzoli, 2007

Synopsis

Harland Miller combines a painterly aesthetic with a literary mind and a uniquely gritty, north-of-England sense of humor. His bold, colorful, and tactile paintings reflect an original perspective on a rich heritage of pop art and literature: there is D. H. Lawrence's Dirty Northern Bastard; Ernest Hemingway's 12 Rounds With God; and Miller's own guide to the glorious English coast, Bridlington: Ninety-Three Million Miles From the Sun. His paintings are at once impressive, funny, and touching, conveying a pervasive sense of nostalgia while playing with the ironies of rhetoric and reputation. Miller has been a celebrated part of the London art scene since the 1990s, alongside such artists as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Morris, and others. In essays and interviews with Jarvis Cocker and Gordon Burn, Miller identifies the influences of such figures as Ed Ruscha, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whose work can be seen to have left a mark on Miller's textured and iconoclastic style.

About this title

About the Author

Harland Miller is represented by the White Cube in London and at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and his books First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified and Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty have earned widespread critical acclaim. He lives and works in London. Jarvis Cocker, formerly lead singer-songwriter of the influential band Pulp, is a musician and writer from Sheffield, England. Gordon Burn is the award-winning author of several novels and nonfiction including On the Way to Work: Damien Hirst, and contributes regularly to The Guardian.

Reviews

This lavishly illustrated but unsatisfying volume features a series of paintings in which writer and artist Miller uses the cover design of the old Penguin Classics as impetus for word play with book titles. In each work the artist begins with the familiar Penguin cover, then paints in invented titles as well as coffee stains, tattered edges and other signs of use. Some of his titles refer to the works of famous authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, who is represented by such titles as 61 with a Bullet. In the "bad weather pictures," Miller plays on cities in northern England, where he grew up. One book, Plan B, was inspired by a friend's suicide. Sometimes he reproduces inscriptions found in used books, and he also depicts a few back-cover mug shots that simulate author photos. The text, which includes a discursive essay by the artist and rambling interviews with Ed Ruscha et al., sheds some light on the genesis of these paintings, but for the most part the text is too irrelevant and the self-referential titles are not clever enough to relieve the monotony of a large number of paintings all based on the same design. (May)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Rizzoli
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0847829286
• ISBN 13: 9780847829286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144