ARTIST RECEPTION: September 20, 3–5 PM
Seven Sisters is pleased to present love, the gallery’s first exhibition with Los Angeles–based painter Allison Miller. Featuring a new body of works created in dialogue with the gallery’s architecture, the exhibition marks Miller’s Texas debut and a bold expansion of her singular, ever-inventive approach to abstraction.
Miller 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.
One black, inky work on paper, Stranger, is stretched into sculpture: unframed, punched with grommets, and cut open, it extends an accordioned arrow from wall to floor. The glossy, patent leather-like surface reflects like a magician’s sleight of hand—looping the viewer away from resolution only to return them to the act of looking. Zodiac, a painting that toys with the lattice of signs, uses the structure of a softened crossword puzzle to support, organize, and subvert pockets of meaning and symbol throughout. Tracings, smudges of color, and letterforms gather and disperse across the grid, ultimately galvanizing into one image, one object.
For love, Miller scales up many of her canvases and leans further into the contradictions inherent to painting—the theater of its making. Grids unravel, arrows bend logic, and forms that suggest stages, indexes, or shards of architecture emerge and dissolve with painterly confidence and mischievous edge. Allusions to nostalgia and the decorative appear yet remain ardently equivocal. Silver chain, ribbons and buttons, a hairband—mingle democratically with atmospheric fields of color, letterforms, and graphic symbols across the surfaces, no one element privileged above another. A tracing is a gesture, a thread is a mark. What is intuited becomes intention; what is spontaneous becomes repetition.
Like Zodiac’s starting point, these paintings operate like unfinished crossword puzzles: legible as systems, yet open to infinite possibilities – meanings multiply rather than resolve. Life is like that. Painting is like that. The next move could pull it all together—or make it fall apart.
If there is a “table” here, it is one set with notes, fragments, leftovers, and seeming non-sequiturs—a ledger of form as feeling, a stage for a restless mind. Installed throughout Seven Sisters, these works heighten a sense of directionality and spatial play: paintings that not only unfold within themselves but also converse with one another and with the surrounding architecture. In this way, love emerges as both a body of work and a site-specific installation, attuned to the dynamics of color, surface, shape, and movement.
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.
