Dan Miller

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new, large-format abstract drawings by the self-taught American artist Dan Miller. This will be the second major showing of Miller’s art in New York.

The visceral quality of Miller’s drawings has been much remarked upon; the energetic nature of his repeated gestures generates a dramatic tensile power. While so much energy may seem difficult to control - always on the verge of explosion or collapse - Miller deftly keeps disaster at bay. He always leaves some white space open to breathe like a safety valve.

Diagnosed with autism, and with few conventional verbal communication skills, Miller has developed an intensive body of work that employs language as its fundamental subject and departure-point. His extraordinary drawings…take the form of accumulations of descriptive texts, alphabets, and numerical sequences. (The texts often have strong biographical references, e.g. acknowledging specific Bay Area locales, and aspects of his immediate day-to-day life and family history.) Typically superimposed on top of one another, these individual words, numbers, and phrases start to merge, creating all-over fields of partially obscured and often illegible texts. His best work achieves a clattering poetry of infinite discrimination. Concentration often seems to go hand-in-hand with certain forms of disability, and Miller concentrates on building oneiric forms into spaces of genuine rue and foreboding. - Kevin Killian and Matthew Higgs