Los Angeles, CA - Margo Leavin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by John M. Miller.  The exhibition, titled Now and Then, will be on view until10 February, 2007.  For over thirty years John M. Miller’s work has consisted of a continuum of highly structured paintings that are both masterful and relentless in their execution.

Now and Then presents to viewers an open door to revelatory perceptual nuance.  What may appear at first glance to be optical agitation is, upon further study, thoroughly considered, calm, still and serene. Miller’s anti-compositional system consists of meticulously produced angled bars repeated in solid colors spanning across large-scale raw canvases.  In a stand off between surface and plane Miller’s gestures are absorbed by surface.  Although hand painted by the artist, the paintings appear to be stamped out in a rote mechanical way.  On close observation, it becomes clear that Miller is exerting an immense degree of control over very subtle color variations.  Dark, nearly black marks shift subtly to greens, reds, and violets.  Whites run warm and cool.  Miller’s paintings hold surprisingly still as one realizes the whole versus its parts.  These paintings are urgent, all consuming in their presence and yet somehow steady and grounded; they are confident in their own existence as perceptual conduits and conceptual essays.

Miller is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship and his work is in the collections of major museums, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The J. Paul Getty Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.