Greg Miller: What's Goin' On
Santa Monica, CA — William Turner Gallery is pleased to present What’s Goin’ On, an exhibition of new paintings by Greg Miller. Opening Saturday, September 12, from 5–8 PM and on view through November 7, 2026, the exhibition continues Miller’s decades-long exploration of American popular culture, memory, media, and the mythology of American life.
For more than three decades, Miller has developed a distinctive visual language from the fragments of American culture —advertisements, comic books, magazine clippings, Hollywood imagery, signage, and other remnants of the American visual landscape. Combining found materials with painting, photorealism, gestural abstraction, and collage, he creates densely layered compositions in which images and text collide, overlap, and acquire new meanings.
In What’s Goin’ On, Miller returns to the visual vocabulary of postwar America with a renewed sense of immediacy. Familiar images are extracted from their original contexts and reassembled into complex environments. His works invite close looking: a fragment of text, a familiar face, or a recognizable symbol can lead the viewer through unexpected associations and shifting narratives.
Miller draws upon the evocative language of advertising and mass media, where desire, aspiration, and consumerism became inseparable from everyday American life. His paintings function as a kind of visual archaeology, excavating the cultural residue of an earlier America while revealing its persistent presence in contemporary life.
The title What’s Goin’ On reflects the open-ended nature of this investigation. Rather than presenting a singular narrative, the exhibition offers a constellation of visual clues and fragments of stories—some recognizable, others deliberately obscured—inviting viewers to construct their own connections between image and text, past and present, personal memory and collective mythology.
At the heart of Miller’s work is a tension between nostalgia and critique. His imagery retains the allure of the culture from which it originates—glamorous, colorful, romantic, and often cinematic—while distressed surfaces, interruptions, and unexpected juxtapositions complicate that attraction. What initially appears familiar becomes unstable upon closer inspection. The past is not simply preserved; it is fragmented, reconstructed, and reconsidered.
Greg Miller (b. 1951) was born in Sacramento, California, and holds a Master of Arts degree from San Jose State University. A longtime resident of Venice, California, he currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. His work is represented in numerous museum and private collections, including the San Jose Museum of Art, Newport Harbor Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum, Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, and Charles Saatchi Foundation.
Miller was the inaugural artist represented by William Turner Gallery when the gallery opened in 1991. What’s Goin’ On continues this relationship more than three decades later, marking another chapter in the gallery’s presentation of an artist whose work has consistently explored the boundaries between painting, collage, popular imagery, and cultural memory.
