Explore the presentation of Harland Miller's ‘The French Letter Paintings’ below, or contact us to schedule an in-person or virtual tour with a member of our Paris sales team.

‘I had wondered if it would be possible for people to feel the same way – to have the same connection and feel that their own personal story was just as effectively portrayed by one word alone, one short word, very short… like YES!’

−      Harland Miller: In the Shadows I Boogie, Phaidon, 2019

A paean to Harland Miller’s time spent in Paris as a young artist and writer during the 1990s, ‘The French Letter Paintings’ attest to his deep-rooted engagement with the narrative, aural and typographical possibilities of language.

Miller has said that ‘the subject of and for my work over the last twenty years has been writing in all its forms and associations – both in terms of writing itself and a love of words – and books, that actual physical form in which written narrative, ideas and theory most commonly appear.’ Following on from his well-known series of fictional book cover paintings, the ‘Letter’ paintings and works on paper began with the idea of using a single word, with just one or two syllables, as a book title and the focus for gestural abstraction.

Miller selects mono- or bisyllabic words such as Ace, Buzz, Boss, Up, Can that accrue multiple meanings through popular use. Rendered in a variety of styles, from the graphic and precise to the painterly and expressive, the paintings reference American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and artists including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha.