Johnny Miller

Gallery Barbara Thumm is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition with Johnny Miller.

Since the early nineties, when Johnny Miller travelled to Japan to study the ancient craft of Hokusai, the acclaimed British artist has continuously developed his mastery of printmaking and specifically of woodcuts. The show presents Millers latest series of large scale pints of sculls. The motive in its simplicity is depicted in a highly sensual and very painterly declination of coloured layers. Already in his earlier series, The Ghost Horses, Miller worked with the themes of memento mori and nature, referring to art historical references, ranging from baroque vanitas paintings to the seriality of Warhol.

At the entrance to the exhibition, a Zebra is depicted, standing in a hallucinatory tropical landscape, in amazement of its own abundance of live.

"The original idea for my zebra picture came from ‘A Zebra’ by the British artist George Stubbs (1724–1806). Part of a series of works on exotic animals, Stubbs’s painting depicts a female zebra that was brought from South Africa in 1762. It was an idealized, populist scene of unnatural beauty. To contemporary viewers, it would have seemed like one of the impossible vignettes produced by AI today. With that in mind, I set out to create my own unnatural landscape paintings.

Stubbs’s painting also reminded me of Edward Said’s famous theory of orientalism. According to Said, the West defined itself in opposition to an exotic Orient. Western countries then used their political and military might to subjugate that Orient. This in turn reminded me of how the Japanese subjugate nature with their stylized gardens and bonsai trees. All these associations evoked by Stubbs’s original painting, especially the dynamics of subjugation and exoticization, fed into and inspired my work."

—Johnny Miller