GREG MILLER TRUE ROMANCE
WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY
GREG MILLER TRUE ROMANCE
WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY
TRUE ROMANCE
William Turner Gallery is pleased to present True Romance , a solo exhibition by Greg Miller. Celebrated for his visually arresting and conceptually layered collages, Greg Miller continues his decades-long excavation of American mass media, memory, and myth-making. In this newest body of work, True Romance , Miller revisits the imagery that has long defined his practice—pulp fiction, billboard advertisements, vintage comics, magazine spreads, and Hollywood’s golden illusions—reassembling these cultural fragments into densely layered vignettes that are both nostalgic and interrogative.
Working in his signature blend of photorealism, gestural abstraction, and mixedmedia collage, Miller constructs what might be described as visual archaeology. His compositions are not passive reflections of bygone Americana but rather active interrogations of how memory, media, and identity are constructed. Like an anthropologist of postwar culture, Miller peels back the layers of the American psyche, embedding his canvases with found texts, clipped advertisements, and iconographic symbols that shaped mid-century ideals of beauty, power, and romance.
While rooted in the seductive visual language of the 1950’s and 60’s, Miller’s work
resists simple nostalgia. The cracked surfaces, distressed textures, and time-worn materials suggest not preservation but erosion—an acknowledgment that the past is as much invention as recollection. The romanticism embedded in these works—echoed in the exhibition’s title—is deliberately ambivalent, positioned somewhere between genuine longing and critical detachment.
Los Angeles, Miller’s longtime home and an enduring muse, reappears here as both setting and subject. Its palm-lined streets, glamour-soaked iconography, and ever-present mythos provide the perfect backdrop for the artist’s ongoing dialogue with American visual culture. In Miller’s hands, LA becomes a collage of its own: sexy, mysterious, dangerous.
True Romance is more than a nostalgic ode; it is a cinematic montage of American desire, loss, and reinvention. Like the pulp novels and romance comics it references, each piece in the show contains a narrative—some suggested, some obscured, all inviting exploration. In Miller’s world, nothing exists in a vacuum; every image, every word is part of a larger, layered story. And in tracing those layers, we find not just echoes of a collective past, but clues to how that past continues to shape our present.
Love Between Hard Covers, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 42” x 96”
Mulholland, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 48” x 48”
Here
It Is, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 72” x 120” (two panels)
Whamm
Acrylic and collage on canvas
60” x 84”
Los Angeles, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 45” x 70”
Modern Acrylic and collage on canvas
45” x 70”
Mr. Bubble, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 36” x 72”
Sure Thing, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 60” x 48”
That
Day, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 48” x 48”
Sunset, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 36” x 36”
Beautiful, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 48” x 48”
Modern Good, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 48” x 48”
All In, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 36” x 36”
GREG MILLER
Greg Miller’s innovative paintings render familiar imagery and text into artworks saturated with poignant slices of Americana. Nostalgic nods to ubiquitous tropes, such as billboards, pulp fictions, comic books, magazine ads and cinema marquees figure in fractions across the canvas. With carefully selected images he composes vignettes to articulate a vernacular about American life and the pervasive symbology of American consumer culture. Disparate objects and figures combine their relationship to one another, coalesce and become a singular subject. The exhibition’s title suggests a fairytale and both the glamour and illusion which Hollywood exports.
Growing up in northern California, Miller’s grandmother would take him on road trips to ghost-towns around Lake Tahoe. While exploring the decaying homes people had abandoned, he was struck by the resourcefulness used to gild the walls with collages of old magazines and newspaper clippings. These archaeological ruins were a foil in contradiction with the tinsel of the aspirational advertisements dressing their walls. Subsequently, Miller became a collector of vintage magazines, newspapers, zines and popular
culture which he uses today as a part of his medium.
Miller’s artistic process can be likened to that of a contemporary archaeologist. By layering books, magazines, and other materials onto the surface of his artworks, he engages in a form of excavation and exploration. Much like an archaeologist delving into the layers of the earth to uncover fragments of the past, Miller digs into the layers of images and text to discover hidden clues and meanings.
Greg Miller (b. 1951) was born in Sacramento, California and holds a Master of Arts Degree from San Jose University. Once a long-time Venice, California resident, he currently resides in LA, CA & Austin, Texas. His work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of: the San Jose Museum of Art, Newport Harbor Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum, Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation.
WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY