Concurrent Shingo Francis Exhibitions in Zushi & Kyoto, Japan

Shingo Francis, Serene Illumination, Oil on canvas, 2026

William Turner Gallery is delighted to share that gallery artist Shingo Francis is participating in the Zushi Art Festival 2026, taking place October 3–25 in Zushi, Japan. This year's festival, themed “The Future Begins Here, A Place for New Beginnings,” brings together contemporary art and cultural programming across a variety of venues throughout the coastal city. Known for his luminous abstractions and explorations of light, color, and perception, Francis creates work that invites viewers to consider their relationship with the surrounding environment. We are thrilled to see his work celebrated as part of this vibrant international arts event. Visit www.zushi-art.com/zaf2026 to learn more about the festival and its programming.

Shingo Francis, Spectrum of Venus, 2026, Oil on canvas, 60” x 60”

Concurrently, Shingo is participating in 50 Seconds Vol. 2, a group exhibition at SODA, an artist-run space in Kyoto, Japan. On view October 10–12 and 17–19, 2026, the exhibition brings together 34 contemporary artists, each presenting a 50-second video work. Known for his luminous explorations of light, color, and perception, Francis brings his distinctive artistic sensibility to this time-based format. Organized by Kazuhito Tanaka, Futo Akiyoshi, and Isabelle Olivier, the exhibition revisits a concept first presented at SODA in 2022, offering a diverse range of artistic perspectives within the shared constraint of 50 seconds. We are delighted to celebrate Shingo's continued international presence and encourage those in Kyoto to experience this exciting exhibition.

Shingo Francis, Appetite for More, Video projection, 2026. Installation at SODA, Kyoto Japan

Digital Catalog for "Greg Miller: What's Goin' On" Out Now!

The digital catalog for Greg Miller: What’s Goin’ On is now available to view, offering a close look at the new works featured in Miller’s ongoing solo exhibition at William Turner Gallery. For those interested in a printed edition, physical copies of the catalog may be reserved by contacting the gallery directly. What’s Goin’ On is currently on view at William Turner Gallery and will be on view through Saturday November 7, 2026. 

ABOUT WHAT'S GOIN' ON: 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.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: 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.

Jimi Gleason "Landline" is now in the Laguna Art Museum Permanent Collection

Jimi gleason, Landline, 2023, silver nitrate, acrylic, canvas, 56”x80”

We're delighted to share that Jimi Gleason's Landline (2023) has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Laguna Art Museum.

At 56 × 80 inches, Landline is a striking example of Jimi's signature process: silver nitrate and acrylic on canvas, producing a surface that catches and shifts with the light so the painting is never quite the same twice. Laguna Art Museum has championed California artists for more than a century, and this acquisition places Jimi firmly within that lineage.

Museum recognition like this is a meaningful milestone in an artist's career, and we're proud to have supported Jimi's work.

Jimi gleason, Landline, 2023, silver nitrate, acrylic, canvas, 56”x80”

RADIANT TERRAINS

Among the exhibition highlights are works by Light and Space pioneers Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and Helen Pashgian; Anthony Friedkin’s photographs engaging the luminous movement of breaking waves; Stephen Hendee’s illuminated architectural environments; Lita Albuquerque’s explorations of celestial space; and Jay McCafferty’s solar-burn drawings. Together with paintings, photographs, installations and other works from the collection, the exhibition demonstrates the diverse ways artists have used light to alter, challenge and expand our understanding of the world around us.

The exhibition is curated by Tyler Stallings, a Southern California curator, writer and researcher who previously served as Chief Curator of Laguna Art Museum. Stallings has organized numerous exhibitions examining California and contemporary art and has curated several exhibitions drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.

Radiant Terrains is presented as part of Laguna Art Museum’s annual Art + Nature program, extending the initiative’s exploration of the natural environment through light, one of nature’s most fundamental and transformative elements. Throughout the exhibition, light creates connections between ocean and sky, body and landscape, scientific observation and spiritual reflection.

ABOUT LAGUNA ART MUSEUM

Laguna Art Museum exists to engage and enlighten people of all ages through art that embodies and preserves the California experience. Laguna Art Museum presents exhibitions relevant to California art and artists throughout the year and is home to the annual Art & Nature Festival celebrating the museum’s unique relationship to the environment.  In 2025, Laguna Art Museum served a record-high 21,000 people during Art + Nature. This year's festival begins on September 19, 2026 with the Radiant Terrains exhibition from the Permanent Collection, which will be on view September 19, 2026 through January 10, 2027.

Jimi Gleason’s 2025 exhibition Vapor Wave at William Turner Gallery

Jimi Gleason turns painting into a shifting register of its surroundings. Using silver nitrate and acrylic, he creates luminous surfaces that reflect, distort, and partially absorb the viewer and the gallery around them. Light glides across the painting's metallic skin, producing subtle shifts in color and tone as viewers change position. Rather than functioning as a conventional mirror, the work returns a softened, fragmented reflection, making the viewer an active participant in the painting itself.

Gleason's layered surfaces oscillate between mirror-like clarity and pearlescent opacity, never settling into a single image. His practice shares affinities with Helen Pashgian's perceptual investigations, yet where Pashgian embeds light within translucent materials, Gleason allows it to remain on the surface. Nearby, Jennifer Bolande similarly redirects attention to the act of looking itself, reminding us that perception is continually shaped by light, movement, and our own presence.

Tyler Stallings - Guest Curator - Radiant Terrains

Last Chance: Moses@100 Closes This Saturday!

Tomorrow is the last day to see Moses@100, William Turner Gallery’s ongoing exhibition commemorating the centennial of artist Ed Moses. Moses was instrumental to the establishment of Los Angeles as a hub of contemporary art – in his review of Moses@100, art critic Edward Goldman writes, “It is impossible to think of the history of the Los Angeles art scene without discussing Ed Moses (1926-2018).” Come see the exhibition this weekend before it’s gone!

Ed Moses was the subject of a major retrospective at MOCA Los Angeles in 1996, and in 2014 he showed at University of California Irvine where he had taught in the seventies. On the occasion of his 2015 drawing show at LACMA of works from the 1960s and 70s, organized by Leslie Jones, director Michael Govan commented, “Ed Moses has been central to the history of art making in Los Angeles for more than half a century.” That exhibition included more than 40 drawings promised to the museum by the artist.

Moses’ work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Greg Miller: What's Goin' On Opening September 12

GREG MILLER: WHAT’S GOIN’ ON

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 5-8PM

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.

Curtis Ripley: High Fidelity Opening

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Curtis Ripley: High Fidelity, an exhibition of new paintings by Curtis Ripley opening April 25, 5-8 PM, and on view through June 20, 2026. The exhibition unfolds as a visual composition: lyrical, atmospheric, and finely attuned to the rhythms of perception.

In Ripley’s paintings, glimmers of paint flicker and flare across darkened grounds, activating the surface with a sense of movement and light. Gestural curls and swirls interact with lines and dashes that guide the viewer’s eye in a choreographed passage across the picture plane. These marks are not merely expressive—they are structural, establishing a sense of tempo and poetic cadence that gives each work its internal coherence.

Forms in Ripley’s work do not resolve immediately. They hover, coalesce, and dissolve, shifting in and out of focus as the viewer’s attention lingers. Color behaves similarly: shapes emerge from the ground only to recede again, creating a continuous interplay between presence and disappearance.

Curtis Ripley, Dreaming in Color, 2026, oil on canvas, 40 x 30”.

The result is a dynamic tension between flatness and depth that remains deliberately unsettled. This instability gives rise to a pronounced sense of atmosphere. Gestural forms drift across layered fields of tone, while Ripley’s palette moves between moments of luminous intensity and expanses of saturated darkness. Subtle gradations of color produce fleeting effects — recalling distant light, reflective shimmer, or the charged stillness of a landscape at dusk. The paintings unfold perceptually, revealing themselves over time rather than at a glance.

Ripley’s practice occupies a space between the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expressionism and the immersive chromatic sensibility of Color Field painting. His work synthesizes these traditions into a contemporary language grounded in process, layering, and revision. While resonant with historical explorations of light and atmosphere, his paintings remain distinctly present—open-ended, responsive, and experiential.

Curtis ripley, Silver Springs, 2026, oil on canvas, 60” x 48

Presented concurrently with Unrepentant Beauty by Roland Reiss, High Fidelity offers a complementary approach to perception—one grounded not in constructed illusion, but in painterly sensation and temporal experience.

Throughout a career spanning more than four decades, Curtis Ripley has exhibited nationally and internationally, with an extensive record of solo exhibitions. Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1949, he received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1975.

Roland Reiss: Unrepentant Beauty Opening

Santa Monica, CA  - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Roland Reiss: Unrepentant Beauty, an exhibition of late paintings by Roland Reiss (1929–2020), opening April 25, 5-8PM and on view through June 20, 2026.

A pioneering figure in postwar American art, Reiss spent more than six decades redefining the possibilities of painting. From his early explorations of abstraction and representation to his groundbreaking sculptural works and miniature environments, his practice consistently expanded the boundaries of the medium.

This exhibition focuses on a remarkable development in his final decades: a series of vibrant, dynamic flower paintings that challenge long-standing assumptions about beauty and subject matter in contemporary art. Historically regarded as decorative or peripheral, the motif of the flower becomes, in Reiss’ hands, a site of formal and conceptual innovation. The artist approached these works with full awareness of their cultural baggage, describing the act of painting flowers as requiring “a leap of faith.”

About these paintings Reiss stated, “Flowers are the vehicle for putting everything I have learned about painting into my work.” The resulting paintings move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, combining bold color, gestural energy, and spatial complexity. Rather than depicting flowers, Reiss uses them as a framework for exploring perception, materiality, and the enduring power of visual experience.

The title Unrepentant Beauty reflects the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty as both subject and strategy. In contrast to earlier generations for whom beauty was often viewed with suspicion, Reiss’ late work asserts its relevance with clarity and conviction.

At the end of a long and influential career, Reiss produced a body of work that is at once playful, rigorous, and deeply resonant—offering a powerful reconsideration of what painting can be.

Roland Reiss studied at the American Academy of Art, Mount San Antonio College and at UCLA. He taught at UCLA, the University of Colorado, and Claremont Graduate University, where he served as Chair for 30 years, from 1971 to 2001. In 2009 he received the College Art Association Award for the Distinguished Teaching of Art. At CGU he held the Benezet Chair in the Humanities and in 2010 an endowed chair in art was established in his name. He was also the director of The Painting's Edge residency at Idyllwild Arts.

Reiss was the recipient of four N.E.A. grants and of numerous prizes and awards. His work is included in many important public and private collections, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hammer Museum, among others.

Now Representing Roland Reiss

William Turner Gallery is honored to announce our representation of the estate of Roland Reiss (1929–2020), one of the most distinctive and intellectually rigorous voices in postwar American art. This partnership reflects the gallery's commitment to championing significant legacies in contemporary art history and ensuring that Reiss's pioneering body of work continues to reach new audiences.

Though widely celebrated for his miniature tableaux, Reiss was first and foremost a painter whose more than sixty-year career left an indelible mark on the Los Angeles and Southern California art scenes. He was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial and Documenta 7 in 1982, and received fourteen solo museum exhibitions over the course of his career, including The Dancing Lessons: 12 Sculptures (1977) at LACMA. He also received survey exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art (2011–2012) and exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. A retrospective of his work was mounted at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1991.

Reiss studied at the American Academy of Art, Mount San Antonio College, and UCLA, graduating with an MA in 1957. He taught at the University of Colorado, UCLA, and Claremont Graduate University, where he chaired the art department for thirty years. In 2009, he received the College Art Association Award for Distinguished Teaching of Art. At CGU he held the Benezet Chair in the Humanities, and in 2010 an endowed chair in art was established in his name. He was also director of The Painting’s Edge residency at Idyllwild Arts.

Reiss received four NEA grants and numerous prizes and awards. His work is held in many significant public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Benton Museum of Art, Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, and Oakland Museum of California.

Guillermo Bert's Upcoming Solo Show at the Museum of Latin American Ar

Congratulations to Guillermo Bert on his upcoming solo show, Techno-Empathy, opening at the Museum of Latin American Art on March 29.

This exhibition shows the Chilean-born artist Guillermo Bert bringing the two together in novel and powerful ways. He uses three principal tools, all of them uncommon in most art production: QR codes, 3-D imaging, and laser engraving. In the Encoded Textiles series, weavings include QR codes that literally embed the story of the weaver into the work so that anyone with a smartphone can see and hear them. Through 3-D imaging, the artist creates life-size images of workers whom he has met, allowing us also to meet them face to face from a unique perspective. Media images today often show migrants and refugees, but Bert uses laser engraving to transfer them onto unusual surfaces, such as wood panels that mimic the look of some of the earliest “high technology:” the rectangular panels that encoded instructions for the first mechanical looms in the 19th century.

Guillermo Bert At William Turner Gallery

Charles Arnoldi in The Hollywood Reporter

Congratulations to Charles Arnoldi for his recent feature in Michael Slenske's article "Guns and Glitter: How LA's Top Artists Reimagine the Oscar" for The Hollywood Reporter!

Charles Arnoldi

Slenske writes: For this portfolio, [Arnoldi] did something he almost never does: “I don’t really think about the Oscars, and I don’t make figurative work,” he says. “But there’s a human quality to this particular sculpture because it has legs and these morphing human forms. I guess you could say that’s a commentary on the chaos that accompanies the Oscars race every year.”

Read the full article at the link below!

SURFACE TENSION: Focus Los Angeles - Opening Saturday 5-8PM

Surface Tension: Focus Los Angeles Opening February 28 5-8PM

Santa Monica, CA  - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Surface Tension: Focus Los Angeles, a major group exhibition of West Coast artists, opening February 28, 5-8 PM, and on view through April 11, 2026.

Surface Tension: Focus Los Angeles explores surface as an active site of meaning, sensation, and perception. The exhibition foregrounds how contemporary practices use texture, layering, and materiality to shape visual and sensory experience. Bridging painting, sculpture, and works at their intersection, the featured artists employ materials ranging from pearlescent and pigmented acrylics to urethane, resin, industrial finishes, and etched line-work.

Together, the works reveal surface as a dynamic interface that captures light, depth, and movement while inviting sustained, close looking. Through extended material experimentation and technical refinement, each artist demonstrates a deep attunement to their chosen medium, using surface to generate tension between control and intuition, precision and discovery, all aimed at igniting a spark of heightened perception.

Featured artists: Dawn Arrowsmith, Casper Brindle, Alex Couwenberg, Shingo Francis, Frank Gehry, Jimi Gleason, James Hayward, Eric Johnson, Peter Lodato, Andy Moses, Ed Moses, Roland Reiss, Scot Heywood and Jennifer Wolf.

Dawn Arrowsmith, Plum Sienna, acrylic on canvas, 56" x 56"

Dawn Arrowsmith produces meditative, color-driven works informed by Buddhist philosophy and extensive travel. Her paintings appear minimal at first glance, gradually revealing optical shimmer and depth through prolonged viewing.

Casper Brindle, LIGHT GLYPH (YELLOW), 2026, VACUUMED FORMED PIGMENTED ACRYLIC

Casper Brindle creates paintings and sculptures that engage light through reflective, industrial materials including resin and automotive paint. His work shifts with the viewer’s movement, emphasizing perception and atmospheric depth.

Alex Couwenberg,  Stranded (I’m), 2025, Acrylic & spray on canvas, 72” x 66”

Alex Couwenberg is a Southern California–based painter whose work draws from Los Angeles modernism and mid-century design. His sleek, glossy paintings are influenced by Hard-edge abstraction and Finish Fetish aesthetics.

Shingo Francis, Mystery to Explore, 2023, Oil on canvas, 24" x 24"

Shingo Francis creates paintings that shimmer and shift through the use of interference pigments that refract light. Influenced by Southern California’s Light and Space movement and his immersion in LA’s art scene, Francis’s works change with viewer position and lighting conditions.

Frank Gehry, Memory of Sophie Calle’s Flower, 2012, Cast urethane with wood pedestal,
24” x 23” x 18”

Frank Gehry (1929–2025) Known for his de-constructivist approach and creative use of materials, Gehry’s buildings share an artist’s sensibility, where surface texture and dynamic form activate his structures. The undulating, curvilinear forms of his architecture are often echoed in the sculptures and drawings he created throughout his long career.

Jimi Gleason, Untitled, 2018, Silver nitrate & acrylic on canvas, 48” x 126”

Jimi Gleason explores the reflective and perceptual properties of light, using materials such as silver nitrate and pearlescent paint. His mirror-like surfaces shift with the viewer and environment, creating interactive, meditative experiences.

James Hayward, Abstract #247, 2023, Oil on canvas, 25” x 23”

James Hayward paints monochromes that celebrate the nuances of color and sensuality of texture. The surfaces are lavish cake icings of paint, almost daring the viewer to touch, lick, engage. Deft strokes of the artist’s hand remain as deep fissures in the surface, further exciting the senses to embrace their physicality.

Scot Heywood, Stack - Black, White, Canvas, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 70” x 74”

Scot Heywood’s works are indebted to the origins of geometric abstraction. Ranging in scale from intimate to encompassing, his paintings consist of multiple, colored canvases, connected in staggered, patchwork patterns, intentionally misaligned to create delightfully disruptive, staccato visual rhythms.

Eric Johnson, Altamira (Triptych), 1992, Composite, wood, & enamel, 40" x 120" x 18"

Eric Johnson creates resin-based sculptures that merge color, form, and structure, drawing from Southern California’s surf, automotive, and aerospace cultures. His works balance polished surfaces with exposed internal architectures, revealing both depth and construction.

Peter Lodato, Vermilion Green & White, 2023, oil on canvas, 96" x 84"

Peter Lodato (1946–2025) emerged from the Light and Space movement, initially creating immersive light installations before translating perceptual effects into painting. His geometric compositions subtly dissolve through layered brushwork and color vibration, challenging visual certainty.

Andy Moses, Geomorphology 1608, 2023, Acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel,
57” x 90” x 5.5”

Andy Moses is known for his intensive exploration of paint’s alchemical properties. Through complex pouring and mixing processes, his luminous abstractions evoke natural forces rather than representational imagery.

Ed Moses, Sato, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72” x 120”

Ed Moses (1926–2018) was a pivotal figure in postwar Los Angeles abstraction and a core member of the Ferus Gallery circle. Known for his experimental, process-driven approach, Moses continuously redefined painting over a career spanning six decades.

Left: Roland Reiss, Mirage, 1968, Fiberglass & resin, 46" x 46" x 6
Right: Roland Reiss, Conundrum, 1968, Acrylic, fiberglass, resin, & gelatin coat, 67" x 46.5" x 6"

Roland Reiss (1929-2020) played a significant role in the evolution of postwar West Coast abstraction. Moving from Abstract Expressionism through resin experimentation and conceptual inquiry, Reiss has consistently explored painting as an energetic, interactive field.

Jennifer Wolf, Dye Painting #2, 2021, Natural dyes and mineral pigments on silk with canvas on wood panel, 48” x 48”

Jennifer Wolf uses natural dyes and hand-ground pigments sourced from global expeditions to create subtly shimmering, immersive paintings. Her work explores the elemental qualities of color and surface through fluid, layered compositions that evoke natural environments.

COAGULA Curatorial Reviews Alex Couwenberg: HIGHLINE

Coagula Curatorial

Mat Gleason founder of Coagula Curatorial reviews Alex Couwenberg’s exhibition Highline that closed at the gallery November 8.

View the catalog for this important exhibition by clicking HERE. You can view the instagram reel review of Highline by clicking the image or the button below.

Jody Zellen Reviews Greg Miller: True Romance

Greg Miller: ‘True Romance’

Graphically and Intellectually Complex Puzzles

by Jody Zellen

Greg Miller’s works are filled with images appropriated from the mass media that appear to be chaotically combined to create messy surfaces with painted drips and ripped newspaper fragments. Each melange is encapsulated in varnish or a glossy medium that unifies the disjointed surface. Many of his works allude to Hollywood movies and movie stars. The paintings have a nostalgic aura, yet are clearly created in the present. Scenes suggesting love, desire and loss, as well as dramatic comic book fist fights fill his colorful panels. Large painted figures are combined with actual magazine excerpts to create narratives. Like other accomplished collage artists, Miller’s refined skills at unifying disparate and unrelated content are clearly evident. He also has a keen wit and sense of humor.

Greg Miller, Beautiful, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 48” x 48”

Many recognizable figures from the past and present fill his canvases: be it Mr. Bubble, The Jolly Green Giant (the well-known advertising mascot for the Green Giant brand of peas), vintage macho comic strip detectives and cowboys, or seductive, smiling women with bright red-lipstick. Miller also inserts book covers, maps and street signs (Mulholland Drive), as well as reproductions of Life Saver candies and pieces of popcorn. Significant scale shifts create an interesting back and forth between the painting and collage. Recognition plays a large part in how Miller’s works are interpreted. For those who know the original context of his appropriated materials, the references are automatic and embedded in nostalgia. Those who don’t, might need to delve deeper into the history of popular culture, but all can applaud Miller’s inventive ways of presenting them in new scenarios and combinations.

Greg Miller, Mr Bubble, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 36” x 72”

Many of Miller’s large-scale horizontal paintings allude to widescreen proportions connecting them to the world of cinema. Love Between Hard Covers (all works 2025) and Mr. Bubble are diptychs that are twice as wide as they are high. Centered in the large, bright and aggressively gestural two panel piece, Here it is, is an illustration of a red and white striped popcorn bag character adorned with gesturing arms and legs. This iconic figure waves as it saunters across the composition. Filling the background is a stylized fist fight between two cartoon characters. As one appears to hit the other, all that is missing is the word WHAAM![aka Roy Lichtenstein, though it appears in another painting so titled and installed across the wall]. Giant pieces of popcorn float across the scene. A banner reading Pain Proof Man sits at the top of the picture. Scattered about the composition are full-size magazine and book pages that also wrap around the edges of the panel. Within the composition are carefully chosen clippings with words or sentences that inform the reading of the densely layered work. It is necessary to read the fine print, as well as follow the flow of the images to fully understand Miller’s intentions.

In the diptych Mr. Bubble, Miller juxtaposes a painting of a woman in a red bathing suit floating in dark blue water with a painted replica of a Mr. Bubble box. The woman appears to be just below the surface, her face obscured by the water above. The illustration of a box of 1970s vintage bubble bath is presented alongside a historical advertisement for the “1st National Surf Show,” a clipping of an old 35-mm camera, magazine cutouts of purple flowers, a bird and a compass. Newspaper fragments are scattered across the piece. Depending on the order in which they are read — ‘Know Something’ ‘five’ ‘beauty’ — they cohere poetically.

Greg Miller, Whamm, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 60” x 84”

In the large piece Whaam, Miller features a cropped close-up of a glamorous woman’s face presumably from a 1950s era advertisement and a hand pinching a red Life Saver candy. Other painted Life Saver candies in yellow, orange and green appear behind the hand, each collaged with letters that spell out words including LIFE, FREE, PLAY or REAL THING. The word WHAAM! is painted in bright yellow and outlined in black in the background amidst an explosion. Covering these painted elements are cutouts of liquor bottles, a camera, the American flag, as well as a tree labeled “High Sierra.” When combined with painted drips and newspaper fragments — Miller’s signature style — these elements create a nuanced narrative that weaves through different generations of popular culture.

Greg Miller, Here It Is, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 72” x 120”

In Beautiful, the word spans edge to edge horizontally. Behind it is a beach scene with a woman in an old-fashioned bathing suit. A pair of red high heel shoes is collaged toward the bottom left covered by a small line of text that reads “With thoughts of the path back.” A collaged hand holds a camera and is overlaid with texts that state “But not so; there was more” and “…if sensing the wilderness of …” A pair of disembodied eyes looks out at the viewer. The scene is beautiful and charged simultaneously. Miller is clearly infatuated and seduced by advertisements and printed ephemera from the past. He carefully selects and arranges aspects from what must be a huge archive of materials, to create graphically and intellectually complex puzzles that are a joy to read and decipher.

Jody Zellen is a Santa Monica-based artist and writer. She has been writing art reviews for more than 25 years and currently contributes to Artillery, ArtScene, Afterimage and Art and Cake. For more information on her art and writings please visit www.jodyzellen.com

Digital Exhibition Catalogs for Greg Miller: True Romance & Jennifer Wolf: Utopalypse

William Turner Gallery currently has two solo shows on view: "Greg Miller: True Romance" and "Jennifer Wolf: Utopalypse". Jennifer Wolf’s art practice is deeply rooted in her personal connection to the Southern Californian landscape: she makes her own dyes and pigments, combining organic materials with state-of-the-art acrylic mediums. Her latest series –  “Utopalypse” – consists of highly evocative abstract pieces on silk mounted on wood. Greg Miller combines layered collages of ephemera collected from the 1950’s and 1960’s with large-scale, photorealistic paintings styled after the golden age of advertising and Americana. Much like an archaeologist delving into the layers of the earth to uncover fragments of the past, Miller digs into the layers of images and text to uncover hidden clues and meanings. Both “True Romance” and “Utopalypse” are ongoing through Saturday, August 16, and digital catalogs are available to view on the William Turner Gallery website.

Jennifer Wolf holds a BA in Art History from UCLA and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. A lifelong California resident, she has exhibited widely and has collaborated with William Turner Gallery since her first solo show in 2004.

Greg Miller (b. 1951) was born in Sacramento, California and holds a Master of Arts Degree from San Jose University. Once a long-time Venice, California resident, he currently resides in LA, CA & Austin, Texas. His work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of: the San Jose Museum of Art, Newport Harbor Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum,  Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation.  Greg Miller was the first exhibition at William Turner Gallery in 1991.  

MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD - RE/DEFINED - Opening at the IAAM, Charleston, SC on June 12, 2025

On Thursday, June 12th at 6 pm the International African American Museum, (Charleston, SC)  is hosting Blackness re/Defined | An Evening of Art & Conversation (IAAM Community) a special celebration marking the public opening of our newest special exhibition, re/Defined: Creative Expressions of Blackness from the Diaspora. 

This dynamic evening will explore the transformative role of Black artists and cultural producers in shaping identity, resisting systemic erasure, and redefining Blackness across generations and geographies. Through conversation and performance, the IAAM will examine how creative expression serves as both a reflection of lived experience and a powerful assertion of agency within the African Diaspora.

The evening will feature a live jazz performance, a curated dialogue between artists and scholars, and exclusive curator-led exhibition tours with Suzanne DiBella and Isabelle Britto. Curator-led tours will begin at 6:00 pm and 6:30 pm with the Music & Conversation Program beginning at 7:00 pm.

Mark Steven Greenfield, Dessalines, 2022, AcrlYic and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 20" X 16"

RE/DEFINED

14 Wharfside Street — Charleston, SC 29401
843-872-5352

JIMI GLEASON: Vapor Wave - Digital Exhibition Catalog

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Vapor Wave, a solo exhibition by Jimi Gleason,  opening April 5 and running through May 31, 2025.

Vapor Wave is Jimi Gleason’s most ambitious body of work to date. Utilizing a rich vocabulary of materials and styles, Gleason has built up gossamer thin layers of iridescent paint to create a series of paintings that are engagingly enigmatic. They confirm an artist at the height of his talent, confidently exploring the power of nuance and understated expression.

In this new series, vaporous ribbons of color play across lustrous surfaces that morph and shift as one engages them. The effect elicits a sense of unexpected revelry - much like the kind one might experience gazing across a lake in a predawn moment, captivated by the growing light as it caresses and undulates across the water’s surface.

And like water, Gleason’s surfaces are quietly in motion, their iridescent paints subtly shifting in hue as light plays across them. In some of the canvases, sharp diagonals bifurcate the compositions, providing dramatic structural rifts to these ethereal surfaces. The effect is a hypnotic and prismatic visual structure, where light, color and form intersect in ever-changing play. Gleason has a uniquely personal connection to water: he grew up surfing, and took up rowing in college. When he talks about his work he also talks about, “the way the light looks underwater,” and early mornings rowing when the calm water reflects the sky at dawn. 

Like many artists working in the Light and Space arena, materials and their catalytic visual effects are essential to their work. In Gleason’s case, he employs silver nitrate and pearlescent paints to activate his surfaces, which catch and reflect surrounding light, further engaging one’s sense of the surrounding space. Gleason is a leader in that next generation of Southern California artists to work in the Light and Space ethos, carrying the dialogue forward and using his work of art to explore the phenomenological properties of perception.

Born in Newport Beach, CA, Gleason received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1985. He studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York City, where he worked as a photo assistant and technician. Returning to California, Gleason was employed in the studio of Ed Moses for five years. Combining the disparate technical and compositional skills developed during his exposure to printmaking, photography and mixed media painting, Gleason is now the subject of considerable curatorial and critical attention. 

Gleason’s work is exhibited in significant public institutions, including the Hammer Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Long Beach Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.The artist’s paintings are actively collected by a growing number of major public and private collections around the world.

CASPER BRINDLE: NUMINA - Exhibition Postponed until January 25, 2025

CASPER BRINDLE: NUMINA
JANUARY 25 - MARCH 22, 2025
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 25, 5-8PM

William Turner Gallery would like to extend our heartfelt sympathies to everyone impacted by the devastating fires in Los Angeles.

In light of these events, our upcoming exhibition, Casper Brindle: Numina, will now open 5-8 PM on January 25, 2025, a week later than originally scheduled. The gallery will continue to remain open during normal business hours,11AM-6PM Tuesday- Saturday, subject to safety advisories from The City of Santa Monica. Go to santamonica.gov or lafd.org for the latest fire & safety  information.

To our wonderful community of artists, patrons, partners, clients, neighbors, we hope you're staying safe and look forward to seeing you soon.

Resources and support for those who need it can be found at the following link:
https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1014-resources-to-support-those-during-the-l-a-fires