Mike Glier’s pictures fit into a long tradition of landscape painting but instead of expressing the majesty of God or Manifest Destiny, his aim is environmentalist–“to visualize the earth as a shared space, sectioned by scientific measure rather than political boundaries,” as he has said. Through a process that is both objective and improvisational, he uses brushes, knives and rags on aluminum to make marks based on motifs, rhythms, and scale relations, continually turning his panel to disrupt the conventions of representational space. Since 2009, the artist has focused on plein air painting. In the series Antipodes , Glier paints outdoors on opposite points of the globe–Botswana and its antipode Hawaii, New Zealand and Spain. Latitude is a series of paintings made in one place over time to study the change of color, light, and motif as the earth tilts on its access. The works from Along a Long Line derive from a trip along the 70th longitude where he painted in five distinct ecologies: the polar desert of Baffin Island, Canada, the rainforest of Jatun Sacha, Ecuador, the subtropics of St. John, US Virgin Islands, and the urban environment of New York City. Glier has likened his painting approach to nature’s evolution–“I experience the process of making these pictures as deep immersion in the principles of organic change, i.e. variables promoted or eliminated, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by chance, in order to satisfy the demands of a particular but ever-shifting environment, in this case a picture.”

Mike Glier’s work has been exhibited extensively at institutions such as MoMA, San Diego Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, Wexner Center in Columbus, OH and Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. In 1996 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. In 1999, in collaboration with his wife Jenny Holzer, he completed a permanent memorial sculpture for the City of Leipzig, Germany and in 2004, Americans for the Arts selected his wall drawing Town Green as one of the best public art works of the year.