John Millei (*1958, Los Angeles) is an adjunct professor at Pasadena’s art faculty, the Claremont Graduate University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He is regarded as a key representative of California’s abstraction that emerged in the 1980s, and he has participated in numerous museum exhibitions alongside major figures such as Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Ernst Wilhelm Nay. His works are held in international collections including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), LACMA (Los Angeles), and Museo Jumex (Mexico City).
Millei began his career in the late 1970s as an assistant to Richard Diebenkorn. His early influences include Jasper Johns’ iconic 0 through 9 series (1960) and the abstract expressionist paintings of John Altoon—an important presence in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and 1960s.
John Millei belongs to a generation of artists—alongside figures such as Lari Pittman, Roger Herman, and later Mary Weatherford, Mark Bradford, and Laura Owens—who helped shift painting in Los Angeles away from the minimalism of the Light and Space movement toward a more painterly, expansive approach. Their work operates in the charged territory between figuration and representation, pop culture and abstract expressionism.
In the 1990s, Millei began exhibiting at the influential Ace Gallery in Los Angeles. Founded in Vancouver and opened in Los Angeles in 1967, Ace became a major institution in the city, exhibiting artists including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Robert Motherwell.
Millei is an artist whose visual vocabulary seems boundless. He plays with images and themes that have long served as motifs within the canon of art history—seascapes, flowers, Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar, Cézanne’s bathers, and many others.
Yet these motifs and genres function merely as points of departure for his imagination. What truly interests Millei is how he can reinvent and subvert such icons—playfully, with a finely tuned sense of the absurd, and with an exceptional command of color and scale.
In the series Woman in a Chair, for example, Millei re-stages Picasso’s famous Portrait de Dora Maar (1937). The paintings in this series are not concerned with Picasso himself, nor with Dora Maar as a subject; rather, they serve as a starting point for Millei’s exploration of his own stylistic development. By engaging with this key motif of twentieth-century art history, he gives full scope to the elasticity of his painterly abilities, stretching the original structure of Picasso’s composition through every imaginable artistic means—color, form, minimalism, and abstraction.
“Millei’s relationship with the past is symbiotic rather than parasitic: he gives it the only authentic life it can have in the present. Turning known artistic territory into a terra incognita of abstraction, he restores art’s existential mystery.”
(Donald Kuspit)
