Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once - York Art Gallery (until 31 May 2020)

Harland Miller, Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore, 2019 (detail)

Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once is at York Art Gallery until 31 May 2020
Harland Miller's paintings are refreshingly pleasurable and intelligent: they combine painterly sensuousness with literary wit.
The "Penguin Book Covers" and the "Pelican Bad Weather Paintings" take as their template the classic Penguin and Pelican book cover designs of the 1950s and 60s - orange cut through with white and blue cut with white, respectively. As Catherine Ince records, Miller recognized a visual affinity  between this design format and Mark Rothko's Abstract Expressionist canvases - but with "graphic furniture"; this seemed especially so in the case of a paperback book that was battered, creased, foxed". (Bracewell (2019) p87)
The paintings - measuring around 7' x 5' - while instantly recognisable as representations of book covers are rendered as colour field paintings rich with washes of colour, smears, stains and dribbles of paint. Into these Miller has inserted witty, invented book titles: Death: What's In It For Me?, Whitby: The Self Catering Years, Narcissist Seeks Similar...
These are beautiful paintings that make you laugh. Mark Rothko meets Ed Ruscha.
This is Yorkshire-born Miller's largest solo exhibition, to date (a mid-career retrospective) and it is a joy to see it in York Art Gallery.
Further Reading
Bracewell, M. et al (2019) In Shadows I Boogie: Harland Miller, London: Phaidon
Burn, G., Cocker, J. and Miller, H. (2007) "Working Titles", The Guardian, 5 May 2007
Draper, J. (2016) "Harland Miller: 'Brevity is no strength of mine'", Studio International, 19 June 2016

Harland Miller, Bad Weather Painting 1, 2020

Harland Miller, Bad Weather Painting 2, 2020

Harland Miller, Bad Weather Painting 4, 2020

Harland Miller, Narcissist Seeks Similar, 2020

Harland Miller, Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore

Harland Miller, Death, What's In It For Me, 2007

Harland Miller, Death, What's In It For Me, 2007 (detail)

Harland Miller, Rags to Polyester, My Story (detail)

Bram Bogart - White Cube, Mason's Yard (until 7 March 2020)

Bram Bogart, La ferme, 1978

Bram Bogart is at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, until 7 March 2020

I had never heard of Bram Bogart (1921-2012) until a few years ago, and although the Tate appears to have four works I have managed, somehow, to miss seeing them. My first direct encounter was happening by chance upon an exhibition in the Vigo Gallery in 2017 – and I was blown away by his muscular, thickly-textured, three dimensional abstract paintings and, in particular, his ‘gestural monochromes’. Now his estate is being represented by White Cube and they are showing his work at Mason’s Yard until 7 March.

The exhibition features paintings produced between 1959 and the mid-1990s [but] the focus of the exhibition is the 1960s and 1970s… In these paintings colour is both subject and object, their heavy masses of paint swiped, dabbed, pushed or drawn across the canvas surface… Read the full gallery text here.
Read an obituary, written by Michael McNay, in The Guardian.

Bram Bogart, Printemps Néerderlandais, 1959

Bram Bogart, Cristal Baroque, 1959

Bram Bogart, Donker en grijs, 1962

Bram Bogart, Windzand, 1963

Bram Bogart, Wit door zwart, 1971

Bram Bogart, Blanc de Brabant, 1977

Bram Bogart, Ardoise, 1981

Bram Bogart, Bince, 1984

Bram Bogart