John Miller
6 June - 5 September 1999
Curator : Lionel Bovier

MAGASIN - Centre National d’Art Contemporain is producing and presenting the first “retrospective” of the work of John Miller. It is organised by Yves Aupetitallot, director of MAGASIN, and Lionel Bovier, a critic and independent curator.
The exhibition will feature some hundred works plus a new installation, Game Show Set. The basic organisation will be chronological, from 1983 to 1999, and will highlight the major groups of works: two series of figurative paintings and drawings from the eighties, the “brown impasto” reliefs and sculptures, three series of photographs and the paintings of TV game shows.

John Miller was born in 1954. After studying on the Whitney Independent Program in New York (1978) and at the Californian Institute of the Arts at Valencia – Cal Arts (1979), he moved to New York. There he began to develop one of the most significant artistic and theoretical productions of his generation. His importance is widely acknowledged on the American art scene, and the acuity of his critical thought is attested in his writings on artists such as Allan McCollum, Mike Kelley, Haim Steinbach, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari.
His work takes a singular, synthetic approach. Miller uses the staple stereotypes of American vernacular culture in order to deconstruct their underlying codes or representation and to bring to the surface the ideology which they obscure. At the same time he is engaged in a global critique of the idea of the author and of the concomitant loss of aura in works of art.