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.

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.