Harland Miller Too Cool To Lose For Sale

Harland Miller (b. 1964, Yorkshire, England) is one of the most distinctive and singular voices in contemporary British painting — a writer, a wit, and an artist whose monumental reimaginings of Penguin Classics paperback covers have created an entirely new genre of painterly reflection on literature, mortality, humour, and the loaded cultural freight of the printed book. Miller published his debut novel, Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, in 2000, and the literary intelligence that animates that work runs through everything he makes. He is, in the most precise sense, a painter who thinks in sentences.

Miller's signature works — the large-scale paintings that appropriate the tripartite layout, typography, Penguin logo, and horizontal colour banding of the classic paperback — are acts of meticulous formal homage and subversive invention simultaneously. He reproduces the template with an accuracy that would satisfy a graphic designer, then populates it with invented titles of sardonic, philosophical, or darkly funny precision: High on Hope, Too Cool to Lose, I Am the One I've Been Waiting For, Hate's Outta Date, Are You Unhappy Darling, This Will End in Tears. The titles hover between self-help and despair, between the grandiose and the resigned, between the kind of aphorism you might find in a 1970s self-improvement paperback and the kind of thought that arrives at three in the morning. Over the surface of this impeccable graphic facsimile, Miller then works with gestural paint handling — broad brushstrokes, impasto, textures that announce the hand of the painter — creating a productive and funny collision between the mechanical certainty of print design and the irreducible physicality of oil on canvas.

Miller is represented by White Cube in London and Skarstedt in New York, two of the most prestigious galleries in their respective markets, and his work trades consistently at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips. His print editions — produced in standard and large formats, both signed and unsigned, including White Cube editions — have built a substantial and devoted collector following, particularly in the United Kingdom, the United States, and internationally among collectors drawn to art that wears its literary sensibility lightly and its formal intelligence seriously. Works by Miller are held in the Tate Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The market for Miller's work is one of the more consistent in contemporary British art — underpinned by a broad base of collectors who appreciate both the wit and the genuine painterly ambition of the work, and who often come to his prints through the paintings before developing a dedicated focus on editions.

Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking to acquire Harland Miller prints and works, and with those looking to sell or have works valued. Our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York brings expertise and market knowledge to every transaction, and we offer free, confidential valuations to assist collectors in understanding the current value of their holdings.