York Pop artist Harland Miller with his new work York from his XXX exhibition at York Art Gallery. Picture: Olivia Hemingway
IF brevity is the soul of wit – ironically a quote from Shakespeare’s longest play, the 40,000-word Hamlet – then that philosophy applies to Pop artist Harland Miller’s new exhibition in York.
“I wanted to use as little language as possible, to see if a short word like ‘If’ , for instance, could mean as much to someone as a long sentence,” he says, on his return to his home city the day after his 61st birthday to launch XXX at York Art Gallery: the gallery he first visited aged 16 on a lunch break from a job he had just started, setting him on his path to international acclaim as an itinerant painter in New York, New Orleans, Berlin and Paris as part of fellow Yorkshireman Jay Jopling’s stable of White Cube gallery artists.
“This show is entitled ‘XXX’ but it doesn’t flout any indecency laws so it should stay open longer than the last one [his Covid-curtailed 2020 show] , which was slated to run for six months but closed after only a few weeks (as was the whole of the city) due to lock down, so I never did find out what being given the keys to the city actually unlocked,” says Harland.
“But York is a city of perpetual mystery and history, including my own, and it always draws me back. It’s especially exciting to be sharing this with everyone – not once, but twice.”
Harland Miller with his 2019 oil on canvas XXX at York Art Gallery. Picture: Olivia Hemingway
Coinciding with the publication of his new book of the same title by Phaidon, Harland is showcasing paintings and preparatory works on graph paper from his Letter Paintings series, topped off by the unveiling of several new oil paintings, not least York – a suitably short city name to match his project brief.
He had built his 2020 York Art Gallery exhibition around its title work, York So Good They Named It Once, a work transformed into mugs, fridge magnets et al. “I knew I wanted to do something about York again, and I thought, ‘how can I bring York into the series I’m making?’. The answer was right in front of my face: all the works used letters that made short words and York is a short word!” says Harland.
“Then I thought, what is coming through that says ‘York’ to me. The white rose, though that was a bit obvious, and yellow from the daffodils that come out in the spring. When I was a kid, the Bar Walls were covered with them.
“My mother wasn’t the most positive person, but she equated the daffodils coming out with York regenerating each year in spring.”
Artist Harland Miller stands by his Oh No work, sporting his newly designed Oh No scarf, on sale at York Art Gallery. Picture: Olivia Hemingway
And so Harland Miller’s ‘York’ blossomed into life as his first ever flower painting: York, so good he has now painted it twice. “Hopefully you see the rose and the daffodil in the white and the yellow, and not a fried egg,” he cautions.
York, a work created since the XXX book went to print, forms part of a hard-edged series that “melds the sacred seamlessly with the everyday”, drawing inspiration from medieval manuscripts, where monks often laboured to produce intricate illuminated letters to mark the beginning of chapters.
In these works, Miller applies bold colours and typefaces to accentuate the expressive versatility of monosyllabic words and acronyms such as ESP, If and Star, the series now expanding to take in Oh No (with an accompanying scarf among the exhibition merchandise), Kiss, Boss and Loop and his first hard-edged diptych, Far Out.
The Letter Paintings present overlaid letter forms as their image, with a neutral band at the bottom in the form of a title alongside Miller’s own name as their author. By isolating, overlaying and reuniting individual letters, he creates a sense of depth in the image and encourages contemplation.
Far Out, Harland Miller’s first diptych from his Letter Paintings series at York Art Gallery. Picture: Olivia Hemingway
“From two letters, I moved on to three-letter words and favourite four-letter words and now a five-letter word, Eerie, though that’s cheating with three ‘E’s. I like to start with a word and then work with the feeling it evokes, like getting an eerie feeling from the word ‘eerie,” says Harland.
“I painted ‘Numb’ just a couple of years ago after my mother passed away. Yellow and purple felt natural colours for it, and I wanted that sense of walking through that numbness in the painting, which had come from that feeling.”
Yellow and purple might strike you as an unusual colour combination, but Miller had studied colour psychology back in the day when working in graphic design with Peter Turpin at Turpin Graphics.
“Yellow can make people feel violent, but what’s interesting is if you introduce purple, which can make people feel introspective, then by putting it with yellow, you can become violently introspective, which isn’t good for you, but part of my punk philosophy is to challenge that.”
Harland Miller, XXX, oil on canvas, 2019. Copyright: Harland Miller. Photo copyright: White Cube, Theo Christelis
The exhibition is defined by the letter X, so good he used it thrice. “Unlike any other letter in the alphabet, it’s also its own word without being a word. ‘X’ is more exciting than ‘I’. It sounds more exciting! I don’t know if it’s exciting because it features in words we like, like ‘exciting’ or ‘sex’, but if was ‘secks’, you wouldn’t get a band called The Sex Pistols! Secks Pistols just wouldn’t look good. ‘X’ is a letter that makes a word look good and sound good.”
The exhibition’s themes will extend beyond the indoor gallery spaces into the gallery gardens, through a creative interpretation of Miller’s Far Out diptych, using a selection of flowering plants. Visible from the ground and the gallery’s balcony, the plantings will be sown on two wired raised planting beds on the sloping grass verge behind the gallery, leads up to the wildflower meadow.
This floral installation will be planned so flowers appear from the end of June, peaking during the summer season, all adding to a show with the XXX factor.
Harland Miller: XXX, York Art Gallery, on show until August 31. Opening times: Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm. Tickets: yorkartgallery.org.uk.
Beatrice Bertram
Dr Beatrice Bertram, senior curator at York Art Gallery, on Harland Miller’s XXXhibition:
“WE are delighted to welcome Harland back to York Art Gallery and his home city to show this extraordinary exhibition entitled XXX. The displays here in York explore his celebrated series of Letter Paintings, brought together for the first time alongside new work created exclusively for our exhibition.
“Harland’s distinctive, impactful paintings are instantly recognisable and repay close looking. His clever use of language and colour encourages us to encounter everyday words afresh, as he lays letters over one another in an intriguing process of deconstruction and reconnection.
“Don’t miss this unique opportunity to experience Miller’s bright, bold, brilliant body of work produced during an exciting new phase in his career.”