Allison Miller

Allison Miller’s art addresses the act of painting itself, largely through emphases on pattern, gesture, and color choice. Her work is also textural, defined by commanding shapes and unconventional combinations of media—oil paint with acrylic, pencil, or dirt, for example. Geometric forms populate Miller’s canvases; rarely rendered in a hard-edge style, these triangles, circles, and squares are composed with slightly wavering, disorienting lines. 

Miller’s approach to crafting such works is largely unpremeditated and born of an experimental process. “I use the term ‘build’ when I talk and think about making the paintings because that's the best way of describing how it feels to make them,” Miller told the Huffington Post in 2012. “Things are tacked-on, pushed back, covered-up, and layered as if I were building an object. I picture some elements sitting in real space where gravity and physical properties come to bear on them or, conversely, where those properties are defied. This is true to the point that I consider a lot of the paintings to be portraits of sculptures, since, if they were to sit in real space, I don't know what else they would be.”

Miller has been included in exhibitions at the Bregenzer Kunstverein in Bregenz, Austria, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Torrance Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, and others. She is a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute and was a fellow at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center Residency in Snowmass, Colorado, in 2010.