a catalog will be published for the occasion, with an essay by Jonathan Stevenson, titled "Matthew Miller and the Perfect Black"
Pocket Utopia and C.G. Boerner are pleased to present "Fools Are Those Who Lose Their Mirrors," a solo exhibition uptown and downtown of paintings and drawings by Matthew Miller. The exhibition uptown at C. G. Boerner will feature portrait paintings as well as abstract drawings by Miller, exhibited for the first time. Downtown at Pocket Utopia we will exhibit Miller's portrait drawings and one abstract drawing.
Jonathan Stevenson writes, "Miller's work exudes what I would call the drama of subtlety. In two small portraits of the same man, visually minuscule divergences-the adjustment of an angle here, a brushstroke there-yield alter egos in quite stark opposition: one vulnerable and probably gentle, the other impervious and latently threatening. The paintings convey that being human is a serious business."
Against a Mars Black background, the heads in Miller's painting are sculptural and the facial expressions are monastic. The paintings are nearly colorless and his graphite portrait drawings appear to hover ghostlike between the intellectual and the immaterial.
Stevenson observes of Miller's new drawings, "Geometrically fastidious, some invoke the rustic, crypto-religious tropes of Lancaster County, including the Amish "broken star" quilt design and the openings carved in "star barns" to effect shaped prisms of sunlight on their interior surfaces."
Matthew Miller (b. 1981 Lancaster, PA) received his BA from Messiah College in 2004 and his MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2008. Selected exhibitions include The magic black of an open barn door on a really sunny summer day, when you just cannot see into it at Famous Accountants (2011); What I Know at NYCAMS (2012), curator, Jason Andrew; Ruminations Anthropocentric at Centotto in Brooklyn (2011); Miller's portrait drawings were also featured at Bushwick Basel in an exhibition curated by Valentine Gallery's Fred Valentine (2012).
Fools Are Those Who Lose Their Mirrors marks Pocket Utopia's and
C.G. Boerner's first official collaboration.
