Allison Miller

  • "I use the term ‘build’ when I talk and think about making the paintings because that's the best way of describing how it feels to make them. Things are tacked-on, pushed back, covered-up, and layered as if I were building an object. I picture some elements sitting in real space where gravity and physical properties come to bear on them or, conversely, where those properties are defied."

    –Allison Miller

  • B. 1974 EVANSTON, IL

    LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES, CA

    DOWNLOAD CV 

  • Allison Miller’s paintings suggest a spontaneity that belies a highly considered and strategic approach. Diverse elements and gestures combine to...
    Allison Miller
    Fugazi, 2025
    oil, oil stick, acrylic, ribbon and thread on canvas
    72 x 75 inches

     

    Allison Miller’s paintings suggest a spontaneity that belies a highly considered and strategic approach. Diverse elements and gestures combine to form active paintings with compositions that never quite settle. The artist is known for her vivid and idiosyncratic experimentations with visual language, resisting fixed meanings while drawing viewers into a space of immediacy, improvisation, and material play. Working with oil, oil stick, acrylic, and collage on canvas, she brings a sharp formal sensibility—balancing graphic color with subtle detail—to compositions she treats as structures built in time: floated, interrupted, and reassembled. Her surfaces register both intuition and exactitude, play and rigor—fields of texture that become at once records of decision-making and sites of surprise.

     

    Her canvases often operate like open systems—grids may unravel, symbols bend logic, and fragments of visual language emerge and dissolve with painterly confidence. Decorative allusions and unexpected references intermingle freely with atmospheric fields of color, letterforms, and graphic symbols; no single element is privileged above another. The result is a dynamic visual field where what feels improvised becomes intentional, and repetition turns into surprise.

     

    Miller treats each painting as a structure built in time: floated, interrupted, and reassembled. Surfaces become records of decision-making and sites of discovery, attuned to the contradictions of painting itself—the theater of its making. Installed together, her works engage in conversation not only with one another but also with their surrounding architecture, heightening a sense of directionality, spatial play, and the restless, generative possibilities of form.

  • Allison Miller (b. 1974, Evanston, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles. Drawing from a wide variety of sources –...
    Allison Miller
    Poem, 2025
    oil, oil stick, acrylic, and ribbon on canvas
    72 x 75 inches
    Allison Miller (b. 1974, Evanston, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles. Drawing from a wide variety of sources – art history, cartoons, graphics, nature, and her own life, to name just a few – Miller’s works deal with both system and intuition, index and improvisation - revealing painting as a site for thought and discovery. 

     

    Miller received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited widely at institutions and galleries, including solo exhibitions at Susan Inglett Gallery (New York), The Pit (Los Angeles), and ACME. (Los Angeles), as well as in group exhibitions at Shrine, LA, Miles McEnery, NY, Philip Martin, LA, Kunstmuseum Mühlheim an der Ruhr, the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, and the Hammer Museum, LA.

     

    Miller’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, among others. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and The Los Angeles Times, among others.

  • detail of "Poem," 2025
  • Works
  • Exhibitions
  • Press